Facebook apologises for removing page of French town called Bitche by mistake

Social media giant Facebook recently apologised for removing the official page of the small French town of Bitche. According to BBC, the social network’s algorithm had confused the name of the town in Moselle, north-east France, with the English insult. However, after being strongly criticised, Facebook said that it reinstated the page as it spotted the error. 

Last month, Bitche’s mayor Benoît Kieffer had said that the Facebook page of the town, which has a population of 5,000, was removed for violating site rules. In a social media post, the mayor said that the page, Ville de Bitche, was no longer online as it was in “violation of conditions applying to Facebook pages”. Kieffer added that the “name of our town seemed to suffer from a bad interpretation”. 

Kieffer criticised Facebook’s methods for monitoring content and said, “What has happened to the town of Bitche demonstrates the insufficient and limited moderating tools that only the human gaze can appreciate”. 

However, a Facebook spokesperson told BBC that the page was removed in “error” and was swiftly restored when the firm became aware of the issue. The media outlet also reported that the mayor of Bitche said that the president of French Facebook had contacted him to tell him that the page has been reinstated and to apologise for the inconvenience. Kieffer also invited him as well as Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to visit Bitche to discover “pretty fortified town”. 

Another French town renames page 

Meanwhile, following the above incident, another town in the region, Rohrbach-lès-Bitche, renamed its page "Ville de Rohrbach" on Monday. In a Facebook post, the town said that Facebook seems to be “hunting a term associated with Rohrback… we’ll let you imagine the reason”. “So we preferred to anticipate rather than risking a page closure,” the town added. 

When translated, the caption read, "hello, We wanted to explain the name change of the page. Far from us the idea of denying the name of our beautiful village... but it is to see that Facebook seems to be hunting the term associated with Rohrbach... we let you imagine the reason... So we preferred to anticipate rather than risking a page closure". 

(Image: Facebook/AP)