Facebook Genealogy Apps Are Temporarily Suspended

Several websites have posted that FamilyLink’s We’re Related (20.4 million users) & Familybuilder’s Family Tree (5.3 million users) were suspended by Facebook last Friday night – being told that “Your application contains ads that link to landing pages completely unrelated to the content in the ad and thus are misleading.”

Here’s hoping that this mess gets straightened out, as a lot of folks use those services. I’m sure that this had the folks at FamilyLink and Familybuilder scrambling. As long as they can get rid of the offending ads, things will get back to normal shortly. Paul Jeffries from Facebook’s Platform Policy team posted the following on the company’s Developer Forum:

In addition to prior enforcements, recently some applications were temporarily suspended for running a high percentage of violating ads. These poor ads — even from a small number of applications — can diminish user confidence in all advertising, adversely impacting the entire Platform ecosystem. However, these apps were not permanently disabled, and assuming there are no other policy violations, will be restored in several days at the end of the scheduled suspensions. We do want to note that in some cases apps may be permanently disabled for ad violations.

For more information, read David Cohen’s column.

Read more at Inside Facebook.

Read more at Gigaom.com.

About Leland Meitzler

Leland K. Meitzler founded Heritage Quest in 1985, and has worked as Managing Editor of both Heritage Quest Magazine and The Genealogical Helper. He currently operates Family Roots Publishing Company (www.FamilyRootsPublishing.com), writes daily at GenealogyBlog.com, writes the weekly Genealogy Newsline, conducts the annual Salt Lake Christmas Tour to the Family History Library, and speaks nationally, having given over 2000 lectures since 1983.

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