Once again one of the biggest social media site Facebook is under fire for indiscriminate removal of content from its pages. It is understood that the action of taking down a page was being initiated through unverified emails; that too where the third party email addresses were used to complain about the copyright infringement. So the identity and motive of email sender was not verified at all, before taking such an action.

Ken Fisher of Ars Technica, a famous tech blog, fumed recently as Facebook locked the account of Ars Technica on infringement of copyright claims. According to Mr. Fisher the account was locked without any prior warning or notice from Facebook and there was no valid reason cited by Facebook for doing that.

Dave Legg of NeoWin, another popular tech blog had the similar complaints against Facebook. He said that his counter complaint was not acknowledged by Facebook, and they said that they would clear the matter with the complainant. The statement of Facebook on this issue was rather diplomatic and they cited the infringement of intellectual property (IP) rights a serious issue. They also mentioned that the IP complaint is made under the penalty of perjury, so fraudulent claims were subject to legal action. But they did not address the issue of the validation of the email addresses, which caused immediate suspension of the account and content from blogs and elsewhere, resulting in the loss of reputation of the company or a person who shared it.

As far as the matter of Ars Technica is concerned, when Facebook found that the claim of IP violation was unfounded, they apologized to Ars Technica and reinstated the pages. But the question that still looms large is that Facebook still is accused of being very slow and inaccessible, apart from the fact that they do not specify why they are taking any penalizing action. While removing the pages, they never specify which particular portion of the content is basically a violation of IP rights. Neither do they ever disclose the identity of the claimant so that the matter can be discussed further.

Such an action on unverified prompts can be a disastrous to the sites which are basically functioning on social media to generate traffic. As indiscriminate removal of the pages, may virtually hurt their Internet marketing campaigns. It may also result in having a direct bearing on the reputation of Facebook as a reliable social media tool.