Statement: Full30 Officially Deplatformed by Facebook

In the past month, you may have noticed you can no longer find Full30 on Facebook. This is not a choice that we made. We did not wake up one day and decide we no longer wanted to use the Social Media giant’s platform. In fact, we actually quite enjoyed the small boost of traffic we were able to obtain from them. While it was never substantial, nor was it ever a core part of our company strategy, it was something we used to connect with our viewers regularly, and to expose the audience to smaller creators who are up and coming.

From 2015, until Mid-April 2021, we used Facebook every day. Seven days a week. The platform was a place for us to plug new content creators, and converse with our viewers on a more casual basis. In Mid-April however, Facebook handed our Social Media coordinator a 90-day ban from the platform, and unpublished our Facebook page for reasons that are still unknown to us right now. As far as we know, we never violated any of the stated community standards that exist on the platform. In fact, we went out of our way to ensure that everything posted there was exactly within the standards.

We reached out to Facebook several times since the deletion of the page. Out of all the times we reached out, we were only able to speak to a company representative once. During that discussion, the representative was extremely helpful, but also genuinely confused.

Here’s the thing, according to the Facebook representative we spoke to, there is no record of Facebook unpublishing or deleting the page. To the representative it appears as if our Facebook page never existed at all. According to the representative, the only way this could have happened is if we manually went into the back-end of our Facebook page and deleted it ourselves. We would have also needed to wait out the 14-day period where you can manually recover your Facebook page from manual deletion. That was not an option that was available to any of the administrators of the Full30 Facebook page at any point in time leading up to the sudden removal of the page.

We further investigated this issue by trying to see if maybe our page, or any of our page administrators was hacked. There was no evidence of this happening, on either the representative’s end, or ours. We’re also a tech company, so people that work here generally don’t make passwords like ‘AwesomePassword1!’ After several hours on the phone with the representative from Facebook, we were forced to end the call as there was nothing else that could be done by Facebook to assist us. We have not heard back from them since.

This is not the first place we have been deplatformed, if you’ve been following us for any length of time, then chances are you already know about the fiasco with our forum hosting service, Discourse. Fortunately for us, the forum service we use is open source, so we were able to get around that situation pretty easily by transferring our hosting service to our own servers on the back-end.

We suspect this issue with Facebook will not be the last time a company decides that an alt-tech web-page promoting the Freedom of Speech and the Second Amendment has no place on their platform.