Facebook takes down (and restores) official page for French town of Bitche
Facebook has 99 problems, and the French town of Bitche is one.
According to local broadcaster Radio Mélodie,
the Facebook page for the small town in northeastern Moselle was taken
down on March 19, forcing Valérie Degouy, Bitche's comms official, to
create a new page on Monday named after its postal code: Mairie 57230.
Degouy told Radio Mélodie on Monday that she appealed the decision
the same day the town's page was taken down, but hadn't heard back from
the tech giant. "I tried to reach out to Facebook in every possible way,
through different forms, but there's nothing [I could] do," she said,
adding that she had "already had issues when I first created the page."
Facebook restored the page after this article was published on Tuesday morning.
Another town in the region, Rohrbach-lès-Bitche, took preventive measures and renamed its page Ville de Rohrbach
on Monday. "Facebook seems to be hunting a term associated with
Rohrbach … we'll let you imagine the reason," the town said in a post announcing the move.
Bitche — the e is silent — is a fortress town famed mostly for the
siege of Bitche, which lasted 230 days during the Franco-Prussian War in
1870 and 1871. Today, it has a little over 5,000 inhabitants.
This is not the first time Bitche has been caught up in a censorship
crossfire. In 1881, U.S. Ambassador to France Levi Parsons Morton took
issue with the location of the American embassy on the Place de Bitche
in Paris, named in honor of the town's wartime effort. Morton,
embarrassed by the embassy's letterhead, asked Parisian authorities to
rename the square — they obliged, changing it to Place des États-Unis.
