“Polandball,” a popular Facebook meme page, has been permanently suspended from the platform, losing over 350,000 followers in the process.
The page, which focused on “geo-political satire,” was notified by Facebook that they would be permanently deleted on Saturday for unknown reasons.
“Hello, friends. Today Poland has received news that his old page will not be coming back. It was finally permanently deleted by Facebook on 3rd February, 2017, along with over 350,000 fans, many years of laughs and comics that are now gone forever,” declared Polandball in a statement on their replacement page, which has accumulated over 25,000 likes. “Something that you should understand is that it was not any particular group of people that got our page deleted, other than Facebook. They were the ones who decided to get rid of our page, and they did this because of the many times we were banned previously. They decided now was the time to end it.”
“We will not be giving up on Polandball and the wonderful community that has been made around it,” they continued. “Thanks to you all very much for being fans, we at Polandball love you. Please continue to support us and our misadventures in geopolitical satire.”
Facebook has repeatedly been criticized for removing comedy pages, some of which have had hundreds of thousands of fans.
In December, Breitbart News reported on a Facebook group of nearly a thousand of the social network’s top page owners, most of whom had been affected by Facebook’s suspensions and were attempting to fight back under the #PowerToThePages hashtag.
Several other Facebook page resistance groups have also popped up over the past two years.
Devin Shire, a Facebook page owner and member of the meme page revolt that took place last year, was sanctioned on the social network after he posted a comedy picture of rapper Drake morphed into a Nintendo 64 controller.
“Originally we only had my page Young Thugga La Meme, Everything Is A Social Construct, another page I admin Chair Memes, Digiannantonio Aesthetic, and Kevin 3 I believe, then we went reaching out to everybody we knew who had pages and had them reach out to every other page admin they knew,” said Shire in August on the topic of the revolt. “It was not easy trying to talk some pages into being apart of this because a lot of them feared the backlash they might receive from Facebook for trying to stand up for this issue.”
Like the #PowerToThePages movement, Shire’s revolt included many different affected page owners and garnered support from top content creators, including the now-suspended Polandball.
In July, a popular Facebook page called “Meninist,” which had nearly 400,000 likes, was permanently suspended, only to be reinstated after Breitbart Tech called Facebook out on the bizarre move.
In the same month, a meme page mocking Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was also removed, with the social network citing a joke image as the reason for deletion.
Numerous other examples of Facebook censorship have taken place almost daily, including the suspension of gay conservative Lucian Wintrich after he used the word “fag,” the removal of a men’s rights conference page on the day of the conference, the censorship and restriction of WikiLeaks links, and the deletion of anti-Islamist and even anti-ISIS content.
Despite the crackdown on harmless and inoffensive content, Facebook has refused to deal with real infringements upon their policies, such as the cartoon posted by the Black Panther Party of Mississippi’s page in July that portrayed a man in a black robe and mask slitting the throat of a police officer.
When contacted for comment, Facebook said that it was investigating the suspension.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.