Oi, Facebook, give us back our page~ 4 min

By Guilhotina.info

Notice: If you want to head directly to the part with instructions on how to help, just click here.

If you’re one of those brave people that still frequents Facebook and simultaneously also belongs to the increasingly rare group of lucky individuals to whom Facebook still shows our posts, you might have noticed that we have suddenly pivoted to livestreaming League of Legends clones.

Despite the fact that such a move is a brilliant idea, it wasn’t a voluntary one. Three days ago, one of the administrators got his account pwned by hackers. In less than ten minutes, we had taken back control of the account, but the fell deed was done. The whole of the original administration team of the Guilhotina.info page had been dumped.

We know what you’re thinking. No, the password wasn’t old, reused and leaked long ago during the Tumblr or Linkedin data breaches. No, the guy didn’t click a promising email from a Nigerian prince. Whatever means were used, they were subtler and didn’t require any active action from the targeted admin.

The page then went silent for a day, presumably up for sale, before being converted into the den of one of those most vile and viscous creatures: a livestream gamer, who then proceeded to delete years of content.

We have safety backups of almost everything important and nobody cares about old posts, so it’s not super serious. It reminds us for the thousandth time that travellers in Facebook’s lands should beware. You’re on your own. No matter that you did everything right. You can still lose it all, years of work, in an instant. And not even for a glorious reason like we’ve been anticipating for years, such as talking about Yemen’s artifical famine, the angelical White Helmets or not jumping into the latest imperialist bandwagon over Ukraine. Just because some asshole got lucky.

And now what? You’ll have to deal with Facebook’s incredibly opaque system that handles such matters. If you can even find the menu for reporting the problem, buried under layers of user guides, it won’t recognize that the page once belonged to you and so it’s impossible to send a report. If you use the feedback tools of your own personal account, at best you’ll get an extremely informative copy pasted message letting you know that you, indeed, are no longer the page’s admin. If by divine intervention you can get someone to write to you over email, they will ask for personal identification documents and then stop replying after you send them over.

Facebook is really quite incredible. If you publish the picture of a refugee floating dead in the Mediterranean or half a swastika, advanced visual pattern recognition algorithms will immediately censor the image and take down the page. But if an account is accessed by a new address halfway around the world, has all of its associated pages purged of the previous administrators and their contents flushed down the toilet, in a clear pattern of malicious behavior that any junior programmer should be able to identify with a half baked script… Nope, nothing to see here.

Since we’ve grown tired of waiting, we decided to take more active measures and we are counting on our marvelous readers, if they are feeling like sending Zuck a couple of messages, to help us get someone over at Facebook pay attention to our humble case.

What you can do to help

1. If you want to keep following us on Facebook while this situation remains unresolved, follow our alternative page.

2. At the stolen page, denounce it via clicking the ellipsis button, followed by “Find support or report Page” > “Pretending to be something” > “A business” and write in our alternative page guilhotinabackup or the complete URL https://www.facebook.com/guilhotinabackup . We know this isn’t the report option that is closest to the situation, but it’s the only one that allows us to point at the previous administration.

3. Visit the Google Play Store and give Zuckerberg’s app the lowest score and an informative text. For example:

Guilhotina.info, a Portuguese alternative media group, had its Facebook page hacked and stolen after years of activity and Facebook took no action to revert the situation. Let it be a warning to others: any page you might grow into any sort of relevance is at risk of being stolen and you’ll get no support whatsoever from Facebook.

4. Meanwhile, you can also follow us on our other usual hangs: Twitter, Instagram, Telegram and our website (Subscribe to the newsletter! Yes, we barely use it, but one of these days…).

A big thank you from your comrades over here at Guilhotina.