Facebook,stop preventing animal advocates & rescuers from saving lives,& deleting our pages.

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,

 On behalf of myself and other animal advocates and crossposters, rescuers,and animal transporters, I would like to bring an important matter to your attention.

 Animal advocate activity seems to be highly monitored on Facebook, with extreme restrictions and penalties placed on us when the constantly-changing policies are broken.

 What we do is networking, in the true sense of the word. We are a group of like-minded people creating and acting upon opportunities – in this case, the opportunities to help animals in need. We are not spammers, law breakers, or a group of radicals; our only interest is to save lives. Working together, we are able to gather donations for rescue, medical care for gravely injured animals, find homes for animals that would otherwise be killed, as well as help low income and disabled people with medical costs for their pets.

  The restrictions placed on us – everything from limiting our ability to tag other crossposters, to preventing us from sending friend requests, to banning us from Facebook for up to 6 weeks,or removing our pages, greatly prevents us from reaching out to more people who can help us with our cause.

We are not a large group of people, so any restriction on our networking is a hardship.

 Tagging restrictions are an issue for many reasons. We are not warned or told that we have reached a maximum number of tags until our post is published.Then we find out many of our tags were never sent. When we are tag ”too often”,we may be asked to name everyone we tagged, from a randomly chosen tag we sent,and if we can’t name the people we tagged, we face a penalty or are banned from Faceboook.

 Another issue is that we are now penalized for sending friend requests to new animal advocates,rescuers,transporters and crossposters not known to each other outside of Facebook. This defeats the purpose of networking.We need to be able to add new friends, regardless if we know them or not.They already have the option to deny the request, or block an individual. I was told I would be banned from Facebook for 30 days if I request a friend I do not know in my “real life”.

 Now Facebook is further hurting our cause by making us change our profile names.We often use terms as "crossposter" or "advocate" or "rescuer".Or if we specifically advocate for a certain breed,one may identify themselves as a,"Chihuahua advocate", for example.The reason this matters is because by identifying ourselves as a crossposter,advocate,or a rescuer,it helps others recognize us as a person they can network with.When we can't identitfy ourselfs in this way it prevents us from requesting new friends that are also advocates/rescuers for animals.Including being able to identify someone that may have a lot of resources for a specific breed they specialize in helping.

 When we are penalized and/or banned from using Facebook because a policy was broken. This further hurts our cause when our pages,including those of rescue groups or rescuers are permanently removed/deleted by Facebook.

 While we understand that there needs to be some sort of regulation of social media as to prevent illegal activity, we feel that as the policies currently stand, great things that can be accomplished through networking are being prevented.

 Last night I responded to only 2 PM,(private messages).I was given a warning,it said, "Please slow down.It appears you are using this feature in a way it was not meant to be used.Please slow down or you could be blocked from using this feature".In addition to nearly every single tag I send,I get a security check,saying I might be sending and unsafe link.

Basically Facebook's system of monitoring us, via their computer algorithms,is registering what we do as "spammy".

 Yet there continue to be an incredibly high amount of hate pages, (promoting hate and violence),pornographic,explicit content,often it appears to possibly be underage,sex trafficking victims,and pages depicting violence.

 These actions against us must stop!!

 We ask that Facebook remove all current restrictions,and penalties imposed on animal advocates and crossposters,rescuers and animal transporters.Including,but not limited to the penalties for requesting too many friends,or people we don't know in "real life",tagging too often,or any form of tag restrictions. Banning us from many functions on facebook, and permanently removing our accounts or turning them into public pages.We also ask that Facebook stops forcing us to change our names,such as identifing ourselves as a rescuer,advocate,crossposter or tranporter in our names.

 Sincerely,

 Facebook Animal Activists,Crossposters,Rescuers and Animal transporters.