Is Facebook using its monopolistic position to crush Facebook Groups?
Ten years ago, when I made moved to Israel from the UK, I opened a small Facebook group to meet other expats like myself in Tel Aviv — that group is called Secret Tel Aviv. The group has now grown into a huge community, and one of the most active groups on Facebook with more than 320,000 members including Mark Zuckerberg and most of the Facebook senior management team in the US, Europe, and Israel.
Most importantly, it has become a community that has provided a lifeline to young Tel Avivians — both expats and now locals — many of whom have moved to Israel alone and are struggling during a pandemic far from the friends and family they have left behind. In the last few weeks and months people have used the group to find out where to get vaccinated, small businesses have generated vital revenue from posts in the group, and our community has used it to come together and support each other.
Yesterday, we changed the cover photo in the Group to promote the Jobs Board on our website. Less than 24 hours later the group was disabled by Facebook. Their official reason for shuttering a community of over 320,000 members was that I approved a post in March 2020 that had pornographic content (in fact a meme which widely circulated on the internet). This raises significant questions as to whether Facebook is using its monopolistic position to crush competition from Facebook Groups?
Has the group been disabled because we promoted the Jobs Board in the cover photo to the Facebook group, and Facebook see this as competition to their newly launched Jobs platform? Is this the latest in a long line of examples where Facebook has used its monopolistic position to crush Groups?
This raises a number of questions:
- Has Facebook been using information that it has collected on groups to create products that in turn make the groups obsolete, such as Marketplace (replacing Buy and Sell Groups), Facebook Jobs (replacing Jobs Groups), Facebook Dating (replacing Dating Groups), and the newly released Questions (replacing all groups)?
- Has Facebook been reducing exposure to posts from Group admins like myself within the Facebook Newsfeed, preventing us from building a brand of our own using the Facebook platform?
- Has Facebook been preventing group admins from generating revenue from the Groups to prevent them from growing from the Facebook platform?
What we do know for sure is that the group is currently disabled, and our 320,000+ members no longer have this resource during these difficult times. Our members deserve more than to have the community turned-off overnight with no warning.
This is all pretty new, so we are still trying to work out the best thing to do to get the Community restored. If you have ever had anything good from Secret Tel Aviv, please can you share this article far and wide. In the meantime our Jobs Board is still live, and we have an amazing 2,500 open positions in some of Israel’s top companies. We recently updated our Business Directory on our website, feel free to add your business — we currently have a bit of a back log but I guess we have a little more time on our hands now. We’ll also provide updates via our newsletter database, you can register here.
If you are a journalist, lawyer, or regulator working in this space, an admin for a group with a similar experience, or even just a member of the Community who just wants to say hi, please send an email to thelist @ secrettelaviv . com.