Facebook angers many after mysteriously deleting popular pro-veteran page

September 12, 2013

On Thursday, administrators of the extremely popular pro-veteran "Uncle Sam's Misguided Children" -- a page that was unpublished over questionable reasons -- thought they had received an early Christmas present when they received notice their page had been republished. But a few hours later, elation turned to shock, and then anger as Facebook mysteriously deleted the page with no warning, page owner Rick Ferran told Examiner.com in an exclusive interview.

Administrators received an email saying the page violated the site's terms of use, despite the fact that Ferran, a Marine Corps veteran who emigrated from Cuba at the age of 13, purged the page of anything that could possibly be considered offensive, in some cases, deleting entire photo albums just to be safe.

We had an opportunity to review the page ourselves to verify first-hand that the page was, as Ferran said, "squeaky clean and PC."

Later, Ferran told Examiner that a moderator put the page into review a week ago and republished it, seeing the appeals were legitimate.

One moderator told Examiner she put the page back up to "restart the cache and avoid deletion," saying she got in trouble for doing so.

Later, she said the page was approved for republishing because of the moderator appeal she filed earlier.

"Even though it is approved, it still has to be moderator quality control checked," she said, adding that it's a "new rule."

But, she said, the page got placed back in a manual line of 21,900 pages she said are "in the same boat," explaining that the page had not yet been checked by higher-ups.

Recently, Facebook told The Blaze that it supports free speech and enforces its policies equally.

But a growing number of the more than 614,000 supporters of the page find that hard to believe, saying Thursday's action proves Facebook is a tyrannical left wing organization that, like the IRS, purposefully targets conservatives.

While page owners can usually see their pages even if they've been unpublished, Ferran said he cannot view the page at all. While attempting to discuss the issue with a social media expert, we received a dialog box telling us the page was marked as unsafe by Facebook's security system.

The moderator we spoke to, however, said the page has not been deleted, and was not taken down due to any political point of view.

But, she said, due to her failed attempt to bring "Uncle Sam's Misguided Children" back, Ferran and the other administrators can expect to wait until sometime in December for the page to be manually approved for reinstatement.

In the meantime, Ferran continues to run his website that now includes an Internet radio station, and is working on his own social media site, Patriot's Link. Ferran also said supporters of his original page can find his work at "America's Misguided Children."

Update: Joe will discuss this issue Thursday, Sept 12 at 7:15 p.m. at BlogTalkRadio. Oddly, Facebook wouldn't allow the link to the site to be posted in a number of timelines.

Update 2: The replacement page came under attack shortly after this article was published. More here.

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