Can I block 100+ people from my Facebook business page? Should I?

October 12, 2015 5:37 AM

I am a licensed holistic health & medical person, serving mostly mothers. I am not a homeopath. There is a closed facebook group of people, which is dedicated mostly to mocking and snarking on alternative/crunchy moms, that has recently taken a turn for the extra nasty.

I have an active social media presence to build my business. The people in this group will post up pages and links to people they do not link and collectively deface or slander them. So far, I have not pinged their radar.

Recently, these people went on a colleagues page and left countless bad one star reviews. My colleague hasn't even met any of these people! My colleague has now had to remove reviews completely from her page.

Is there any downside I'm not catching to blocking the 100 or so most active members of this group? will it hurt my business page functionality in any way?

I have not interacted with these people so far, will I still be able to block them from my business page?

posted by anonymous to Technology (7 answers total)

I looked under a page I manage, and if it's possible to ban someone who hasn't yet interacted with your page, I can't see where you do it. So you might not be able to pro-actively ban. Should you ever become a target, it is easy to ban anyone who likes the pages, comments on it, posts it, or mentions it somewhere else.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:22 AM on October 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Be very careful about who you ban and why you are banning them.
The Food Babe, evidently, is pretty busy with the banhammer; so much so, those banned have their own group.
Just something to think about from the other side of the coin.

Banned by The Food Babe.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 6:43 AM on October 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

i think you'd have to be pretty famous to have a group associated with being banned from your site. especially if these people are already in a group that is likely being banned from each place they attack (are they going to create a new group for each holistic provider that bans them?).

i'd be more worried about them becoming aware of pre-emptive banning (if it's possible) and then targeting you (via non-banned people they know) because of that.
posted by andrewcooke at 7:15 AM on October 12, 2015

Hmm. You say this group is devoted to mocking and snarking, but is it in the groups' code of ethics to actually bring their snark to the people they're busting on? Because I used to be in a group that sometimes would snark on crazy fandom stuff, but it was considered VERY BAD for anyone in our group to directly act upon the people we were snarking (i.e., we could talk amongst ourselves about the lady who had taken out a blog declaring herself Severus Snape's mystic wife, but we could NOT go to her blog and post a comment that "are you crazy, you are not his wife").

Check if the group you're talking about has the same kind of policy. If they do, you may be able to reach out to the mods in advance and tell 'em about what you saw on your colleague's page. Or, find out what the terms of service are for the ISP they use and make a veiled threat ("I bet Dreamwidth would take a dim view of what your'e doing" or whatever).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:16 AM on October 12, 2015

I'm not sure you can pre-emptively ban people from your page technologically before they've interacted unless you have a group and it's closed. I think this might be a good opportunity for setting up some "terms of engagement" for your site that would allow for banning this sort of activity in the future, sort of like "We will remove any reviews for people who bare not actually customers" or whatever so that you have the tools you will need when (if) the time comes.
posted by jessamyn at 8:09 AM on October 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

is it in the groups' code of ethics to actually bring their snark to the people they're busting on

I would say "[leaving] countless bad one star reviews" rises to this level, yes.
posted by pullayup at 8:19 AM on October 12, 2015

Recently, these people went on a colleagues page and left countless bad one star reviews.

If you can prove that, then I would report the group to Facebook. That's electronic harassment.
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:35 AM on October 12, 2015 [4 favorites]