Facebook restores 10 million posts from social media rival Tsu two months after ban
Tsu is a social network that pays its users to post original content. Users can make peer to peer payments. Small businesses can sell their work directly on Tsu and verified charities can accept donations from Tsu users.
Sebastian Sobczak, Founder and CEO of Tsu
Nonprofit organisation Charity Water has received over $30,000 in donations which has bought food and water for six months to 50 families.
Tsu users make "tens of thousands of donations each month increasing at the rate of 68 percent per month" according to Tsu's founder and CEO Sebastian Sobczak.
Facebook stopped Tsu from using its share api on September 25th.
It also removed up to 10 million posts and images from almost five million Tsu users who made references to the Tsu domain across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.
Facebook said that it required "any website or app that integrates with Facebook to comply with our platform policies. It added: "We do not allow developers to incentivize content sharing on our platform because it encourages spammy sharing".
Sobczak said: "Facebook API dashboard data summary proves tsu 'spam' on the Facebook platform is one-third as 'spammy' as the average Facebook API integration".
"As you can see often there are zero reports of spam due to our app whereas there is spam coming from the average Facebook API app" he added.
The two companies have been working together to get a resolution to the problem and to restore historical posts from users.
A Facebook spokesperson said "The cause of this issue was concurrent sharing within the Tsu app.
Because Tsu incentivizes content sharing on their platform and sharing to Facebook was part of the same action, it was also being incentivized, leading to spam abuse on our platform.
By working with them to separate those two actions in their app interface, we were able to remove the incentivized sharing to Facebook and bring the developer into compliance with our policy".
I asked Facebook why users were also banned from mentioning the Tsu.co domain across Facebook Messenger and Instagram when Tsu does not connect to the Messenger or Instagram API.
Facebook said: "From a technical perspective, Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram operate on the same platform, so our anti-spam systems govern all of them together.
Now that the incentivized sharing on Facebook has been removed, we're hopeful this will bring Tsu below our spam threshold for the entire platform".
It was very important to Tsu that Facebook restored access to user's content. Sobczak is passionate about users owning their content and being paid for their content. "This is value created by content - we never ask anyone to open up their credit card" he said.
It is good that Facebook has done the right thing and restored content for users of Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.
British artist Claudia Everest sells her work through peer to peer payments on Tsu. Her 7,500 posts and images restored to her Facebook page. She said:
"It is great to see Facebook have reinstated my work. I hope this signifies that Facebook are waking up to the fact that by working in a more collaborative manner with other smaller networks, the sum of the parts will be greater than the whole and everyone will benefit."
Tsu and YouTube both pay content creatorsfor their work. YouTube pays around one million of its creators whereas every user on Tsu has the opportunity to earn revenue and donate that revenue to charity.
Imagine if five million people across the Tsu all gave 10 cents to Charity Water. $500,000 is enough to build 50 water wells in Africa. Each well saves around 5,000 lives and provides a lifetime of clean water. 50,000 lives could be saved - all for doing what you usually do on social networks.
The restoration of Tsu content is "validation that (Tsu has) an important platform that is recognised by the largest player in the space" said Sobczak.
Disclosure: I joined Tsu as a user to take a look at the site before I wrote about the platform in 2014 and I still use the platform regularly.
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