My friend Hawke Robinson just shared the following with one of the mailing lists he maintains for Tolkien fans. I, personally, do not like Facebook and have as little to do with the service as I can. I maintain a couple of personal accounts because my friends, coworkers, and relatives kept sending me invites. Once in a blue moon I share something there.
Greetings Fellow Tolkien Enthusiasts,
We attracted too much attention with more than a thousand FB friends for the Tolkien Scholars account. With all the promoting this week leading up to tomorrows broadcast, someone must have complained, and FB has deleted the account. Right after we were approved to announce the meeting on the Tolkien Society FB page, it was killed. Now all the postings a completely lost forever, with no recourse for recovery. Fortunately nothing actually important other than the connections.
This is the third community account this month, they are really on a tear. I never use FB personally, only for community projects, and only as an alias.
So, please follow on our website or Google+ or Twitter for updates, FB is dead for TS alas. Fortunately the other networks are much more reasonable about flexible use.
Sorry there isn’t anything we can do about that. We’ll setup a basic FB page, but those don’t get any traction the way having an actual account on FB does.
Please let others know.
Namarie!
Why? No explanation for why this was done.
These social services delete/deactivate so many accounts they don’t really have to explain why they do anything. But Facebook is particularly user-unfriendly. It always has been. It just amazes me that so many people continue to use it.
As to the Facebook deletion: i’m guessing it was a bot that was on duty looking for ad-bots. Nothing personal, in all likelihood.
That makes sense.