It is crazy to see all of the fake news, hate-filled rhetoric, and just vile stuff that gets shared on Facebook daily. It’s even crazier that my site sits there watching from behind bars in a digital jail.

This site has been sent to Facebook jail months ago, and there doesn’t seem to be any parol in site.

Below is my story about being sentenced to a digital crime that I didn’t commit and being proven guilty without any recourse. This is how Facebook marked me as spam and sent me to Facebook jail

How I Got Sent To Facebook Jail

I’m not going to lie, earlier in the year, I let this website languish a little. I love writing for the site, however, life got busy. I couldn’t find the time to do my job, write my novel, and work on the site. The site went quiet. It also got disheartening when I spent so much time writing and trying to publish content and I wasn’t seeing much uptick in visitors to the site.

But then COVID-19 hit.

Since I worked from home during the pandemic, I found that I had more time to devote to all my projects. I started writing more. When I first started working on the site in full force again, one of my first pieces was one about how I thought I caught COVID-19 back in November. Shortly after that, I noticed that I wasn’t able to share any of my new posts on Facebook. After searching for answers, it turned out that Facebook marked me as spam and put me in Facebook Jail.

Being in Facebook jail means is that while I can still post updates to the JSwordSmith Facebook page, I am no longer able to post links from the site, share any posts from this page to my personal Facebook account, nor post any JSwordSmith links on any of my Facebook-related accounts. I can’t have a link to my own website on my Instagram account because Facebook has marked me as spam.

Posts That Go Against The Community Standard

When I found this out, I was surprised that Facebook marked me as spam. I tried really hard in building the site and posting about it to not be spammy. I’m also trying to grow the site, and I don’t want people to think that I’m just a spam site. What I figured happened is that my COVID-19 post got me flagged somehow even though the post never says anything about actually confirming that I had it, nor that it was fine.

But it boggles my mind that I would get marked as spam and placed in Facebook jail because of the post. It didn’t make much sense with everything out there. Worse, there wasn’t anything that I could do to argue my case with Facebook other than to say that the posts that were being marked were made in mistake.

Being put in Facebook jail is frustrating because most of my traffic had been coming from that social media site. More frustrating is that I wasn’t notified or told the reason why my site has been blocked.

Problem Solving

When I first noticed that I had been placed in Facebook jail, I searched the site to see if there was anything I could do. There isn’t any literature other than what I put above. It just says that my site is spam. There was no way to chat with anyone at Facebook to get more information.

I broadened my search to the entire internet. What I found were sites trying to make a quick buck that claimed to be able to unblock you, for a fee of $200 or more. I also found old pages about how to actually talk to someone that worked at Facebook. None of those methods actually work anymore.

I even tried to buy an ad for the site on Facebook. I figured money talks, but since my site goes against the community standards, I couldn’t even do it! I’ve tried putting my site through their debugger but it only tells me that Facebook has marked me as spam.

This has gone on since March and I’m not sure when it will stop.

Facebook Doesn’t Want To Talk To You

The feeling I get after trying to problem solve is that Facebook doesn’t want to talk to anyone about being put in Facebook jail. It doesn’t want its users to have the ability to contest their decisions.

I will admit that Facebook has done a lot for my little site. I wouldn’t have gotten the users that I do get without them. But that doesn’t mean that I want to play by their rules when I don’t feel like I’ve broken any rule. If I had, I would try to fix it, but there are no specifics given to me that I can fix it.

I have searched high and low and the only thing that I have found is getting people to fill out the form here, requesting the site to be unblocked has worked. I have posted the link from my personal account and the page and friends have gone in to fill it out and request the site to be unlocked, but my site still remains behind Facebook jail and there doesn’t seem to be any way out of it.

What I really want is just answers on how I can fix things so that I can get my facebook users to my site. If anyone at Facebook could help, I’d appreciate it!