Thu 30 Jul 2009
Banned by Facebook for having too many of the wrong friends?
Posted by Marlow Harris under Real Estate, Social networking
[12] Comments
Jim Calabrese, owner of NY firm Real Estate Signs has been banned from Facebook for having too many friends that had the same characteristics, i.e. REALTORS. Apparently, according to FB, this is in an indication of spam, spamming or potential to spam.
His supporters say that Jim sent out messages to friends and customers such as:
“Dear Sally, Thanks for the sign order! You can reach out to me here on Facebook if there is any thing you need. Sincerely, Jim Calabrese”.
Those kind of notes to people (sending several in one day) and a few other activities (including making too many friends “who share similar physical characteristics”) may get you banned too.
You get what you pay for and one would be unwise to depend too heavily on FB or other social networking sites, paid or free. We’ve already seen them publish our wish lists, sell our demographics to advertisers and ban photos they deem inappropriate, such as new Moms nursing their babies. And while I’m at it, I think it prudent to mention that I hope you’re not saving all your photos to Flickr or videos to YouTube. I mean, you have copies saved on an external harddrive too, right? While unlikely, you never know when a server will go down or a company out of business, so better safe than sorry.
12 Responses to “ Banned by Facebook for having too many of the wrong friends? ”
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[...] Marlow Harris wrote an interesting post today onBanned by <b>Facebook</b> for having too many Realtor friends? | 360DigestHere’s a quick excerpt [...]
Facebook? really? wow, so it means that you now need to select the type of people you have as friends and what to tell them ! amazing..
I find it kind of hard to believe that he got banned for “having too many realtor friends.”
I think there’s way more to the story than what you are presenting here. While I know facebook can be stringent on their rules there’s no way that this guy got banned for that. I have tons of Realtor friends and I don’t have a problem.
If you read the comments, there is a little bit more of an explanation. Apparently people placed real estate sign orders to his company. Then he thanked them ON FACEBOOK, often using the same language in each note (Dear So-and-So, thank you for your order!….). He did that so often, FB thought he was spamming people. Most of these people he was thanking were Realtors who had placed sign orders.
Here’s the “more to the story”:
The day I was disabled, I had received 3 or 4 friend requests. All of these requests were from Realtors. I accepted the first one and sent a message thanking them.
I accepted the 2nd one and sent a thank you message. AFTER I accepted I got a warning that I was violating FB’s Terms of Use in regards to abusive behavior. No mention of what I did wrong. Certainly it was some error, I thought, because how can ACCEPTING a friend REQUEST be considered abusive?
I accepted the 3rd request and up pops another warning. Moments later, my account was logged off. Upon logging back in, I was notified that my account was disabled.
I sent an email to Facebook’s User Operations and received an auto-reply stating that they would get back to me sometime.
Four days later, I received another form letter email, this time telling me that “Facebook has limits in place to prevent behavior that other users may find annoying or abusive. These limits restrict the rate at which you can use certain features on the site. Unfortunately, we cannot provide you with the specific rates that have been deemed abusive.”
The email also stated “Also, please keep in mind that we do not allow users to maintain a personal profile for business or promotional purposes. If you want to give your business a presence on Facebook, I recommend creating a Facebook page at the following link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php.”
I was sure that this was a standard reply, because if they had taken the time to look at my profile, they would see that I did not use it to plug my business and that I did have a Facebook fan page for my business. I was even a Facebook advertiser!
I pressed for a better explanation, and four days later I received this message: “Your account was disabled because you exceeded Facebook’s limits on multiple occasions, despite having been warned to slow down.” Slow down? slow down doing what?
It went on to say that they believed that some of my friends were strangers and had determined that a “large group of my friends shared similar physical characteristics”. Since the only common denominator was that most of my friends were Realtors, I assumed that’s what they were referring to.
I’ve been involved in the real estate industry for 30+ years. I count over 18,000 real estate firms as clients. I couldn’t even begin to estimate the agent count. I’ve traveled to virtually every city in the US, attended well over a thousand real estate conventions. Of my 2700 FB friends, probably 2500 of them were Realtors. I have met and established relationships with a lot more than 2500 Realtors.
Bare in mind, that these FB friends didn’t get added overnight. They came as a mixture of requests from me, requests from others and suggestions my friends have made. I don’t think I ever used FB’s “friend suggestions” feature. I’ve never used any application, game or quiz, some encourage quickly adding friends, joining groups, commenting as part of the game play. In any event, every FB relationship formed was with a willing user. It is well publicized that FB has a 5000 friend limit. Many of my friends have reached that limit.
If FB thinks that 2700 friends is too many, why set the limit at 5000?
If FB doesn’t want the platform to be used for business relationships, why did they include workplaces as networks?
There is a limit for nearly everything on Facebook.
There is a messaging limit
There is a search limit
There is a friend limit
There is a group limit
There is a poking limit
There is a wall posting limit
Unfortunately, they refuse to reveal just what those limits may be.
Another disabled user sums it up well: “Picture if you will, getting pulled over by police. Upon appearing at your window and looking at your ID, the policeman says, “I’m going to let you off with a warning, but don’t let me catch you doing it again, or you’re going to jail.” Doing what again, you might answer. The policeman looks sternly at you and bellows “I can’t tell you that, but you better not do it again.”
That’s unbelievable behavior in this age of “transparency”. Don’t believe some companies motto of “Do no harm”. They’re corporations, after all, and their job is to keep their investors and/or shareholders happy and to always consider the bottom line. It’s naive to believe that “free” is synonymous with “good”, as everything has a price.
Yeah, Facebook has it’s limitations should use accordingly to your needs and not for so much aggregation of the product or site, also using the same content or copy will only result into getting banned
When I start using, I found that Facebook has limitation and I always maintaining. I have more than 1000+ friendlist and more friends are realtors. but after reading this it seems that I also have to limit it.
This is ridiculous.
))
We made a little spoof video about Facebook’s disabling my account: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU7eCAeQsBA It’s hysterical.
Any of my former FB friends and new can join my group: Free Jim Calabrese – Get him back on Facebook url: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=401977400000