Breaking News – Disability is not good for Facebook says: ‘Facebook’. – Ability
Access I guess this means that we will
have to go in to the closet when it comes to discussing our disabilities. Maybe
we should come up with code words to hide who we are?.
From: David Goldfield
Sent: Monday, April 8, 2019 5:35 PM
To: blind-philly-comp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-philly-comp] Breaking News – Disability is not good for
Facebook says: ‘Facebook’. – Ability Access
https://abilityaccess.blog/2019/04/08/breaking-news-disability-is-not-good-for-facebook-says-facebook/amp/
Breaking News – Disability is not good for Facebook says: ‘Facebook’.
5 hours ago
Simon Sansome
By Simon Sansome
In an astonishing recorded call from Facebook, listen below.
Ability Access is the UK’s largest disability page with over 12,000 followers
and often goes viral. This week is no exception, with reaching an audience of
over 5 million people and 1.5 million interactions.
Earlier this week, Ability Access, was blocked from inviting people to like the
page after getting over 3000 new likes.
Scheduling a call with Facebook Marketing Team to resolve this issue, we asked
why we had been blocked and their reply is shocking and possibly discriminatory.
In a recorded conversation the operator who is a marketing expert at Facebook
said: “You will have to understand that some people see disability as
disturbing, you will have to think about it like that”.
The operator then went on to say “I have never come across a page that promotes
disability”.
Simon – “So, to promote my page, I need to go through customer service again,
because I have been banned from promoting my page on disability”.
Operator “Yes, yes”.
Ability Access was set up in 2016 to get people talking about disability in the
UK. It is a well-known platform in the UK in the disabled community and used by
multiple organisation to promote disability charities, community events and is
seen as a social hub in the disabled community.
As a disabled journalist I could not believe what was happening, when I say in
the conversation, I had to leave the room I reached for my zoom (a recording
device used by journalists) and was waiting for it to load up.
What happed in this conversation was just shocking and quite sad, for the
disabled community as millions of people with disabilities use Facebook as
their main communication tool and to have an employee to say “You will have to
understand that some people see disability as disturbing, you will have to
think about it like that” and to find out we have been blocked from inviting
people to the page takes away a person’s freedom of speech.
Ability Access will be contacting Facebook for a comment on this story and will
update readers on the reply.
David Goldfield
Assistive Technology Specialist
Feel free to visit my Web site
WWW.DavidGoldfield.info
