What do you do when someone sets up a fake city Facebook page?

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Permalink Reply by Sam Allgood on March 30, 2010 at 12:38pm

Not sure if you will find what you need here, but it may point you in the right direction ... http://www.facebook.com/legal/copyright.php

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Permalink Reply by Bandar El-Eita on March 30, 2010 at 2:32pm

I have heard from PAOs who have reached out to the admin of the group and politely asked they stop or to mark it as unofficial. There results were extremely positive, and they found that most people were doing it from a positive standpoint (ie how great is my town, city, regimen or whatever)

That could be a positive outreach experience, before you call the facebook cops

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Permalink Reply by Paul Jennings on April 1, 2010 at 11:26am

I would endorse this approach.

My view is that - if not you who..?

Someone will create a page if you do not, it is how you manage that relationship which will make the difference. We are all resource limited so getting someone else to do the work may pay dividends.

A second thought - as citizens we're all stakeholders of our council. This means that we should not expect the get everything on a plate and realise that sometimes we will need to lend a hand.

Waffling over!

Thanks

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Permalink Reply by Tara Bowen-Biggs on March 30, 2010 at 2:36pm

We have had the same experience with twitter and Multnomah County. We worked with twitter directly and got the issue resolved within a day. (from @Multco)

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Permalink Reply by Walter Neary on March 31, 2010 at 4:24pm

Great work, Tara ... how do you work with Facebook directly? Did you call cold, or approach someone in particular?

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Permalink Reply by Andrew Krzmarzick on March 31, 2010 at 12:41pm

I posted this question over in the Government 2.0 Club group and Syd responded:

"@Andrew at the bottom of Facebook pages there is a "Report Page" link. I suggest you report it. You will be prompted for a category of why you are reporting and a comment. Be sure to include your assoication with the City. I reported a page that was claiming to be the State of Delaware and when I checked back a week or so later I noticed the wall posts stopped on the same date I reported and then a week after that the page started redirecting to the main news stream. It is no longer available in a search. It is possible the owner closed it the same day but I think that would be to coincidental."

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Permalink Reply by Cyd Athens on April 1, 2010 at 4:45pm

When a member of the public used our official logo on their site, we contacted our Prosecuting Attorney's office. They contacted the account holder and requested that they not only remove the logo, but also include verbiage of non-affiliation in their bio.

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Permalink Reply by Ari Herzog, MPA on May 16, 2010 at 11:43am

What was the solution, Walter? Seems the page is now gone.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Lunceford on May 17, 2010 at 5:14pm

Wondering if posting to the wall of http://Facebook.com/government may help as well....didn't see name squatting specifically addressed on that fanpage....

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Permalink Reply by Adriel Hampton on May 17, 2010 at 5:26pm

Forget "someone," Walter, Facebook itself has happily set up a page for your city with scraped wikipedia content and an automatically populated set of "fans" - http://bit.ly/baJeHi

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