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Facebook Takes Down Official Page for the French Town of Bitche

posted by martyb on Wednesday April 14 2021, @01:25AM   
from the life's-a-Bitche-sometimes dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Facebook takes down official page for the French town of Bitche:

In an unusual turn of events, the Facebook page for Bitche, a small town in northeastern Moselle, France, was taken down on March 19, as Zuck's offensive verbiage police pulled the town's name into the social platform's unusually stringent dragnet.

According to Politico.eu, the Monday takedown temporarily forced Valérie Degouy, the town's communications administrator, to generate a new page labeled after the area postal code, Mairie 57230.

[...] "I already had problems when I created the town's Facebook page. I could not enter the word Bitche; it was impossible," she said. "I had to create a page that I had called Ville fortifiée, and change it afterwards, in the description, to say that it was the official page of the town of Bitche and point out at the same time, the username was Ville de Bitche. At that time in 2016, it was allowed."

[...] At long last, Facebook restored the original page on Tuesday, almost a month later. The mayor, Benoît Kieffer, said in a Facebook post, translated by the Guardian: "The name of our town seems to suffer from a bad interpretation ... the most astonishing thing is that Facebook took so long to correct this."

What overly-aggressive filter blocks have you encountered?

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Original Submission

• Re:Ah yes, the Scunthorpe problem strikes again Re:Ah yes, the Scunthorpe problem strikes again (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 14 2021, @10:23AM (1 child)

  by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Wednesday April 14 2021, @10:23AM (#1137375) Homepage

  Except it can. It's one of those things that helps maintain stability in a society. Some people, some times, need to be protected from some things, for the benefit of society as a whole. And I say that as someone who describes himself as, to rough approximation, a free speech absolutist, as the margins by which I differ from absolute absolutism are extremely tiny, but non-zero. Here, grab some Unwin, /Sex and culture/: https://archive.org/details/b20442580/page/n7 - on anthropological timescales, little's changed since when it was written except a slight acceleration in the rate at which the predicted could become true.
  
  TL;DR - having leather-clad blokes pissing on each other atop floats in the Pride rally might not be such positive societal progress as apparently everyone thought at the time.

  --
  Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

  Parent

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• Re:Ah yes, the Scunthorpe problem strikes again (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 14 2021, @12:18PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 14 2021, @12:18PM (#1137400)

  Haven’t you seen the memo? Pride is too commercialized to mean anything so it’s being boycotted. Pinkwashshing is pinkwashing.

  Parent