Last week, former child star, abstinence enthusiast and bitchin’ birthday party host Kirk Cameron released the trailer for his latest faith-based film entitled, Unstoppable, which should not be confused for the choo-choo train movie starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pine. Instead, Cameron’s Unstoppable addresses the question, “Why does God let bad things happen to good people?” and follows the actor as he travels across the country and stares at random things in the distance.
Except, a funny thing happened on the way to Cameron trying to post his trailer to Facebook – it was blocked by the social media giant, and Cameron claims he was informed by Facebook officials that it was deemed “abusive” and “unsafe,” leading him to take the above “censorship” picture and ask his 600,000+ followers to post and re-post to get the word out there. Marketing and SEO experts, eat your hearts out.
But despite Cameron’s claims that he was being unfairly targeted and persecuted by the Matrix for his beliefs, Facebook released a statement explaining that this was all just a misunderstanding.
To protect the hundreds of millions of people who connect and share on Facebook every day, we have automated systems that work in the background to maintain a trusted environment and protect our users from bad actors who often use links to spread spam and malware. These systems are so effective that most people who use Facebook will never encounter spam. They’re not perfect, though, and in rare instances they make mistakes. This link was blocked for a very short period of time after being misidentified as a potential spam or malware site. We learn from rare cases such as these to make our systems even better. (Via Entertainment Weekly)
To clarify a little further, Facebook’s communications manager, Michael Kirkland, also explained that sometimes people might want to look into where they’re buying their domains from before they start pushing them out there.
“From what we can tell, the address purchased for the movie was previously being used as a spam site and it hadn’t been refreshed in our system yet,” said Kirkland.
“We were in direct contact with Kirk’s team on this and reversed the block as soon as we confirmed that the address was no longer being used for spam.” (Via Christian Post)
The web address in question is UnstoppableTheMovie.com, which strikes me as a very odd domain to have been used for spam, unless it was one of those sites that streamed the other Unstoppable illegally. But it also doesn’t seem like Facebook is randomly in the business of censoring Christianity.
Either way, this was a hell, I mean, heck of a marketing play by Cameron.