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Parece que Being Latino has been shut down on Facebook, according to Eric Cortes. For context, in case you don’t know what BL is, ClickZ Marketing news had this to say about the group just a few days ago:
Being Latino: This is not an example of a brand expression on Facebook but rather of how Facebook helped build a brand from scratch. Entrepreneur Lance Rios found that there was no real space for Bicultural Latinos to interact and express themselves; no media was communicating with Bicultural Latinos in English and tapping into the specific needs of this segment.
U.S.-born Hispanics have grown in an English-speaking world influenced by American media, which neither represents nor includes them. Being Latino filled a huge gap in mass media communications with a conventional social media platform with over 50,000 fans in Facebook and an estimate of over 100,000 across its entire platform. Filling that gap was crucial, though the key driver was not only being Latino, but being bold. Bold because it allowed real conversation around sensitive topics like discrimination, immigration, differences among Latinos, etc. The conversations are very passionate, no matter if the subject is politics, food, or sports.
Being Latino was, indeed, a gathering place for provocative discussions. Did Facebook shut it down because the conversations were too caliente for their pristine space? I don’t know. We wrote to Facebook requesting comment, and we got this back:
Hello,
Thanks for contacting Facebook. We understand that you may be on deadline and will do our best to respond as quickly as possible. We also encourage you to visit our Press Page (http://www.facebook.com/press.php), where you will find general information such as the latest statistics.
I suspect they’re kind of busy today.
Meanwhile, we’ll hang out at the new Facebook page You Can’t Keep Us From Being Latino – Bring Back BL.
We’ll let you know if we hear anything. In the meantime, ¡viva la revolución!
UPDATE: BL founder and jefe Lance Ríos had this to say to us when we asked him about the shutdown:
“I was notified that there were posts that were flagged multiple times on Monday evening. From what I’ve gathered FB has a process where it automatically freezes accounts after a certain amount of flags. Given none of the posts were hateful or offensive in any way, this is believed to be a coordinated attack against the page. The same thing happened last week to our wordpress page. I had to appeal it and after the reviewed that no terms had been violated, the blog was back up.”
Emphasis ours. What a crazy mundo we live in.
