Friday, February 04, 2011

The Atheist Experience Facebook page

I know this won't be of interest to many of you, but for our Facebooking friends, here's a curious thing. Over on Facebook, there's an Atheist Experience page that looks for all the world to be official. Except it isn't, and never has been. We have no idea who put it up, and whoever did seems to have abandoned administrating it. It currently has over 7740 "likers," all of whom clearly hopped aboard thinking it was an official page, and who have in fact built up something of a little community there. So it would be a shame to have to get it taken down, which is why Jen is looking into whether Facebook will simply let us take it over. We don't relish having it taken down and starting up our own from scratch, but that's what we'll do if we must.

We don't have a problem with fans doing fan stuff. After all, most of the people who have become fans of the show did so after discovering YouTube clips posted by other fans. And we're aware that on the intarweebs, a lot of stuff is simply going to be out of our hands.

What bugs us is that this page was set up to look official when it is not, and thus whoever created it is guilty of deceiving our viewers. If this had been set up as a fan page (there's already a fine fan group, run by the Macalpine clan, though I have no idea what the difference is between "pages" and "groups" as Facebook sees them, or why they created two separate but nearly entirely similar things in the first place), then hey, fine. If we get to take the page over, we'll definitely use it in a more (I can't believe I'm about to use this fucking word) proactive way, posting frequent Wall updates relating to ACA activities, blog posts, video clips, and other stuff of interest. As it is, we can use it to do none of those things, and fans meanwhile are posting stuff to its Wall addressed directly to us, oblivious to the fact we aren't even seeing it. So, you know, we'll keep you posted.

Of course, if the person who did create the page happens to be reading this, dude, let us have admin privileges and take it off your hands. We won't send ninja after you or anything.

10 comments:

  1. good luck taking over the page... not many ways to spread the message that it is OK to be 'out' as an atheist. i've actually had a few fb 'friends' block me because of some of my status updates. good riddance. :)

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  2. Hmm interesting...I'm always on Facebook so it'd be great to get updates from you guys. I haven't joined any obviously atheist groups before; I don't hide it from friends if they ask but I'd prefer my family didn't know just yet (I'm now especially thankful for my 'no family on Facebook' policy). Good luck getting the group, I may have to join and just see if I get any funny reactions from "friends"!

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  3. The request is in, and I just got an email from Facebook saying they're reviewing the information.

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  4. 7,748 is a lot but I bet in a couple years of taking over the page with some publicity from the show and viewers it could be up to 25,000 or more. I think you guys should have rights to take over the page under intellectual property rights or something. It wasn't right the guy set up the page without getting permission but he probably had good intent.

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  5. Well, they have a thing about confirming that you're an official representative of an organization when making a page of an organization. So whoever did it lied, and facebook might lean towards giving it over.

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  6. Do Matt, Tracie, Russell and Don know it's fake? Because they are listed as "likers" for the page.

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  7. @Rational Jen. Good luck with that. Should only take FB approximately three years to review it.

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  8. Universal Pictures recently took over the fan pages for several of their popular movies. Obviously there is some sort of mechanism in place for doing so.

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  9. Rather than let us take over the squatter's page, Facebook just deleted it.

    Never fear. Scan your eyeballs to the right hand sidebar and you will see the 'like box' for the new, official page.

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