Facebook users will have to look elsewhere for their daily dose of Johnny Fartpants, Buster Gonads and the Two Fat Slags after bosses at the social media giant suspended Viz magazine over what they called “content violation”.
The issue for Viz, however, is which of its foul-mouthed characters is to blame, as Facebook has not detailed what the problem is but has warned that if the appeal is unsuccessful Viz faces an outright ban.
Ian Westwood, group managing director at parent Dennis Publishing, told the Guardian: “The question is what is, and isn’t acceptable to Facebook. We have had that Facebook page for five years. We have had correspondence with them before about stuff they haven’t liked and we’ve taken it down. This time they have just blocked the page and won’t tell us what we’ve violated.
“We can appeal, but we don’t know what we would be appealing about, we put up a significant number of posts from the print brand to social media each day.”
The magazine, first published nearly 40 years ago, alerted Viz fans to the ban on Twitter. “We were thinking how best to respond to it,” Westwood said. “We thought the best thing of all was to first of all let our followers know on Twitter. It’s becoming something of a cause celebre, a negative being turned into a positive.”
Viz has since posted a further tweet asking Facebook if its new profile was “still too offensive?”.
All may not be lost when it comes to keeping in touch with readers, however, as Dennis recently appointed Acxiom to create and manage a new customer database to boost personalisation across its media brands.
The appointment sees Dennis and Acxiom working to create an insight-driven single customer view database, integrating online and offline data from over 16 different sources.
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