What is Facebook Jail? Put simply it is when Facebook penalises your page for breaking its rules…
If you find yourself in Facebook jail, then you can expect your page to be banned from posting new content or running any paid promotions.
Jail time can range from a few hours, to days or weeks. In some extreme cases, it can result in a permanent block on your Facebook ad account or even the removal of the offending Facebook page or profile.
So how do you stay out of Facebook jail?
#1 – Don’t Spam
It’s against Facebook’s Community Standards to send spam or engage in harassing behaviour. Specific actions that Facebook considers spam are:
- Sending friend requests to people you don’t know in real life
- Contacting people for commercial purposes without their consent
- Tagging or messaging people who aren’t your friends
- Posting the same message or link URL several times
Be careful when using Facebook messenger too – make sure you don’t just copy and paste the same message to multiple people. To protect users from spam and other unsolicited commercial messages, Facebook flags when someone repeatedly sends the same message.
UPDATE: If you are asking friends to like your Facebook page then asking too many in a short space of time may also be viewed as spam!
#2 – Avoid Prohibited Content
Here are a few of the things that aren’t allowed on Facebook:
- Nudity or other sexually suggestive content
- Hate speech, credible threats or direct attacks on an individual or group
- Content that contains self-harm or excessive violence
- Fake or impostor profiles
- Spam
Facebook removes content, disables accounts and works with law enforcement when they believe there is a genuine risk to public safety.
This includes the removal of posts that use threatening language, contain credible threats of physical harm to individuals and posts that make specific threats of theft, vandalism or other financial harm.
Some specific things that Facebook does not allow include:any promotion of self-injury or suicide.
- any organisations that it believes to be engaged in terrorist or criminal activity.
- Pages that identify and shame private individuals.
- Images altered to degrade private individuals.
- Photos or videos of physical bullying posted to shame the victim.
- Sharing personal information to blackmail or harass people.
- Photographs or videos depicting incidents of sexual violence.
- Sexual or violent images shared in revenge or without permission from the people in the images.
#3 – Always use your real name on your profile
Facebook requires each user to represent themselves with their ‘authentic identity.’
This means using your real name on your personal profile and each person only having one Facebook profile.
Facebook says:
“If we discover that you have multiple personal profiles, we may ask you to close the additional profiles. We also remove any profiles that impersonate other people.”
Facebook also makes it clear that for everything other than your personal profile, you should be using a Facebook page:
“If you want to create a presence on Facebook for your pet, organisation, favourite film, games character or another purpose, please create a Page instead of a Facebook Profile. Pages can help you conduct business, stay in touch with fans or promote a cause you care about.”
#4 – Create Original Content
Facebook is committed to helping people and organisations protect their intellectual property rights.
The Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities does not allow posting content that violates someone else’s intellectual property rights, including copyright and trademark.
If Facebook receives a report claiming content on Facebook infringes intellectual property rights, they may remove that content from Facebook without contacting you first.
If you repeatedly post content that infringes someone else’s intellectual property rights, your account may be disabled or your Page removed under Facebook’s repeat infringer policy.
Your ability to post photos or videos may be limited, and you could also lose access to certain features or functionality on Facebook.
The easy way to resolve this? Create and post ORIGINAL content.
