by Leigh Goessl

Created on: June 29, 2010

At some point on the night of June 28 or early June 29, 2010 the popular 'Boycott BP' page disappeared off the Facebook network. The fan page had over 734,000 'likes' at the time of the apparent delete and has a steady and vocal following.

Many people are angry about the oil spill and the Boycott BP page is one way some have chosen to express their outrage. Fans of the page exchanged photos, video clips and share their increased frustration over the devastation the BP oil spill has caused.

The page was created by "Bayou Lee" Perkins, who has even caught the attention of the media with his movement, having done a recent interview with Diane Sawyer.

Almost immediately after the page disappeared Perkins wrote on his personal web site "FaceBook apparently is in the barrel for BIG OIL! They are a slippery bunch. No notice. No warnings of supposed violation of usage policy. Total disregard for procedure... My daughter's and two close friends' FaceBook accounts have been removed." (Daily Finance).

The page has since been restored after having been out for about nine hours, but many individuals across the web are wondering what caused the page to be seemingly swiped off the network in the first place, and conspiracies emerged. Words such as 'censorship' have also been tossed about.

Facebook later released a statement that said "The admin profile of the Boycott BP Page was disabled by our automated systems therefore removing all the content that had been created by the profile. After a manual review we determined the profile was removed in error and it has now been restored along with the page" (Tech Crunch).

Other than that Facebook has not given any other indicators as to what the cause was behind the alleged automated delete.

Apparently Facebook is not willing to divulge any more information than said in their official statement because it would "weaken their effectiveness".

The question remains whether or not Facebook purposely deleted the page or are they telling the truth and it was a system error that flagged and removed the popular boycott page?  Perhaps the cause is related to proprietary technical specs they would rather keep under wrap. Or maybe their reasoning was more sinister.

Only Facebook knows for sure, but it seems odd Facebook would intentionally delete a page with so many dedicated followers and think no one would notice. From a business perspective that seems like a bad move. Facebook has made a lot of mistakes in the past few months, but this time it seems perhaps the networking giant should be given a break and the benefit of the doubt.

It's not like Facebook isn't prone to glitches and other problematic issues.

Sources:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/29/facebook-boycott-bp -page/

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-466703

Finance

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