S.Africa: Who threatens whom? City threatens Facebook and Facebook threatens city!!!

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[I hate these dumb names. Tshwane is a disgusting name for Pretoria. Everything is a silly mess. Jan]

Facebook will disable the City of Tshwane’s account from next month.

To avoid losing access to its official Facebook page, Tshwane will have to create a new account and add it as an admin user of the page before 5 May 2022.

The social media giant notified the metropolitan municipality of the issue with an in-app message explaining why it was shutting down the account.

Facebook said that the account Tshwane used was a “grey account” — an older type of account used in the past to manage Facebook Pages and run ads.

These accounts do not have any personal profiles associated with them.

They also do not offer the same security features as standard accounts, so Facebook has deprecated them.

Facebook said Tshwane would have to create a new standard account to continue using the platform.

It also explained that the city could keep control of any pages or groups it manages by moving ownership of these to the new account.

Tshwane’s account runs an official page with more than 286,000 followers.

Like other government organisations, it uses the page to communicate important events that might impact citizens, including power outages, potential water shortages, and service delivery disruptions.

Initially, the municipality announced the account had already been disabled and a new page would be available from Friday, 8 April 2022. That was with only a day’s notice.

The announcement was curious, given that the municipality had the option to migrate the existing page to its new account.

Tshwane created its Facebook page in November 2010, which means it took more than 11 years to amass its current following.

Fortunately, the city has clarified to MyBroadband that it will not trash its old page.

As suggested by Facebook, it plans to instead give ownership of the current page to a new standard account, meaning it will lose none of its followers, and residents won’t be left in the dark on the latest developments in their metro.

Source: https://mybroadband.co.za/news/government/440440-__trashed-2__trashed.html?utm_source=newsletter