-Jasmine Dyer-

Cousins!

A school district in Kentucky is demanding answers from Facebook after the social media platform removed posts congratulating the district’s newly hired Black principals!

The Jefferson County Public Schools district (JCPS) always posts new principal hires on all their social media accounts, according to JCPS chief of communications Carolyn Callahan. Since May, the school district published 11 Facebook posts welcoming all their new principals, six white and five Black.

However it appears Facebook’s automated system removed all posts of the Black principals for violating “Community Standards on spam,” while the white principals remained untouched, as reported by Blavity.

“Any time we have a new principal, we put a post on all of our social media platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,” said Carolyn Callahan, a spokesperson for JCPS.

“It has never been an issue before.”

“When it happened once, we thought, ‘Ok, maybe we are doing something wrong,’ but two times, three times, four times, five times. The Black principals removed. Every white principal, six of them, stayed up,” Callahan explained.

An automated message was sent from the site to notify JCPS of the issue; the message stated, “Your post goes against our Community Standards on spam. Only people who manage Jefferson County Public Schools can see this post. We have these standards to prevent things like false advertising, fraud and security breaches. If your content goes against our Community Standards again, your account may be restricted or disabled. You can disagree with the decision if you think we got it wrong.”

( 📸: WFPL.Org)

The district appealed each of the spam removals, but they didn’t get a response until Congressman John Yarmouth called the Facebook parent company, Meta, on Tuesday. After the call, the platform stated it was unclear why the automated system took the posts down, they were shortly put back up, but the incident is still under investigation, according to WLKY.

JCPS chief equity officer John Marshall did not take this event lightly. He expressed his frustration in a tweet to Facebook once changes were made, but the posts were removed again.

“Hey @Facebook, @JCPSKY recently put up 11 posts announcing new principals. 5 were Black. 6 were white,” Marshall tweeted. “You took down all posts celebrating the Black principals. You say the posts violated your Community Standards on spam. WHY?”

In a statement to Spectrum News, Marshall stated the district does not play when it comes to the diversity of their staff. “It’s very concerning considering the fact that this district, as you know, is very serious about our racial equity policy, very serious about diversifying our hiring staff and leadership, and wanted to celebrate all the principals,” Marshall said. “We want to celebrate and use a platform as powerful as Facebook to celebrate what Facebook professes to be about — diversity, equity, inclusion, celebration, and uplift of the community.”

The company released this statement to WLKY, saying, “These posts were mistakenly removed by our automated system. We sincerely regret the error and are looking into how it happened.”

Cousins, what are your thoughts on this error by Facebook?