Small businesses across regional Western Australia say their trade has taken a significant hit after tech giant Meta wrongfully accused them of spreading child abuse material via their social media pages.<\/p>\n
The ABC has spoken to multiple business owners who were horrified after Meta, which runs Facebook and Instagram, suspended their pages after falsely alleging the pages contained child exploitation material.<\/p>\n
The removals often led to the suspension of personal accounts linked to those businesses.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Samantha Enticknap’s makeup business and personal accounts across Meta’s platforms were removed.\u00a0 (ABC South West WA: Pip Waller)<\/p>\n
Samantha Enticknap runs a make-up business in Margaret River, 271 kilometres south of Perth, and said all of her social media accounts were suspended on July 14.<\/p>\n
“I opened my email and saw due to sexually explicit content and nudity with children I had been suspended,” Ms Enticknap said.<\/p>\n
“I have a make-up page with pictures of make-up on women. There’s no nudity.<\/p>\n
“It was horrifying to see this accusation and it really affected both my business and myself emotionally.”‘Breach of community standards’\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ms Enticknap was told by Meta her account had been suspended because it had breached the tech company’s community standards.<\/p>\n
Cindy Kempton runs a fitness company across the Kimberley and the Pilbara and has been without her social media pages for six weeks.<\/p>\n
Meta, again, cited child abuse material as the reason for the suspension.<\/p>\n
“Which is completely untrue. We very rarely, if ever, put children up on our Instagram because of the regulations surrounding children,” Ms Kempton said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The social media pages of six of Cindy Kempton’s fitness companies were removed after they were flagged by Meta.\u00a0 (ABC Kimberley: Ruby Littler)<\/p>\n
“We’ve lost tens of thousands of followers and the enquiries for our business dropped dramatically because there was no way of people contacting us.<\/p>\n
“It just caused so many issues, not only for us but also for our communities and our business.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Both businesses outlined significant difficulty with Meta’s appeals process, due to the inability to make contact with anyone in the company.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Meta told Samantha Enticknap that her accounts were suspended because of a breach in the platform’s community standards.\u00a0 (Supplied)<\/p>\n
The ABC understands Meta uses a combination of humans and AI technology to find and remove accounts that break its rules.<\/p>\n
However, according to the tech giant, there has been no increase in incorrect enforcement of its rules.<\/p>\n
In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said the company took action on accounts that violated its policies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“People can appeal if they think we’ve made a mistake,” the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
‘Own the house, own the land’<\/p>\n
The Small Business Development Corporation is a WA government agency that provides free advice to small businesses across the state.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Director Caragh Waller said a lot of businesses were under the misapprehension that their business page was their asset, but that was not the case when it was through a private company such as Meta.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We would advise businesses to be careful about having all your eggs in the Meta basket,” Ms Waller said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It’s akin to building a house on someone else’s land. Your house is your business, so make sure you own the land.<\/p>\n
“It’s a huge financial hit [for these businesses], but it’s also reputational damage to be linked to something quite unsavoury on the internet.”<\/p>\n
When questioned by the ABC, Meta restored Ms Enticknap’s accounts, but Ms Kempton remains offline.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Cindy Kempton says the closure of her Meta accounts has caused a string of issues for her business.\u00a0 (ABC Kimberley: Ruby Littler)<\/p>\n
In the space of three weeks, Ms Enticknap said she had an 80 per cent loss in revenue.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It’s just a minefield of knowing who to speak to, who to go to, how we get our businesses back,” she said.<\/p>\n
“We’re just small businesses trying to make money.<\/p>\n
“Just give us an explanation of what we’ve done and a better review process.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Small businesses across regional Western Australia say their trade has taken a significant hit after tech giant Meta…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[64,63,99,47986,47984,47983,47987,24514,1333,47982,12587,47985,41844,45],"class_list":["post-58697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-caragh-waller","tag-cindy-kempton","tag-community-standards","tag-facebook-account-suspended","tag-kimberley-news","tag-meta","tag-samantha-enticknap","tag-small-business","tag-small-business-development-corporation","tag-south-west-news","tag-wa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}