santacruzarmory

From Robert (Rocky) DeForge:

“Well it looks like after almost 5 years the “community” and the sheeple at Facebook have given in to the pressure of the anti-gun crowd. Our Santa Cruz Armory page has been unpublished by Facebook for violating their Community Standards policy . . .

It saddens me to think that the “community” and Facebook can’t see what our business has done and continues to do. The toy and food drives for the needy, donated to families and members of our community that have health problems, donated time, money and resources to community programs, donated to the American Cancer Society, supported local schools and sports, supported our local law enforcement and their fundraisers, our troops stateside and abroad, supported our local fire and EMS community, supported child firearms safety and women’s training and shooting programs and ON AND ON!! It baffles me to think that our business could violate Facebook’s idea of what a community minded business should be.

Shame on you Fakebook! You sure like to swing the weight of the 1st Amendment around, it’s terribly sad that you don’t support the 2nd Amendment.”

policyFB

In all fairness to Facebook when they make changes in their algorithms sometimes it doesn’t go as planned. We are reaching out to them to figure out why Santa Cruz’s page out of all of the hundreds of legitimate firearms dealers and manufacturers was targeted. I have known Rocky for a while, and their posts aren’t any more unusual than any others out there.

The ban wasn’t just directed at the business page either. Here is a later update from Rocky:

“I can’t get the url because the page has now been totally deleted. FB has now limited our page admins on their respective business and personal pages. They aren’t allowed to post either.“

More information as it becomes available.

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104 COMMENTS

  1. This is why I quit Facebook years ago. I don’t like totalitarian dictatorships that pose as communities of free expression. Mark Zuckerberg can go piss up a rope.

    • A Facebook and age is a poor substitute for a website in this digital age. If you own a business, get a real site and maintain it. If Facebook is your only digital lifeline you alienate non Facebook users like me.

      For those that have businesses and no real website, please realize that you are not reaching everyone who doesn’t see your storefront. You lose ever sale that the possible buyer never sees.

      • You should spend some listening to Gary Vaynerchuk, you can’t build a community or engage a community with a web page all by itself. It’s not 2001 anymore. Consumers have changed. Do you still have a phonebook at home?

        • @ JISS:

          “Do you still have a phonebook at home?”

          Yes, and at work. It can be a major PITA to find local businesses/vendors on the web. Sometimes the phone book cuts the time wasted significantly. Consider too that phone books are at most a year out of date, while defunct data live forever on the net.

        • yes as a matter of fact I DO still have a phone book at home. I’m guessing you are one of those 13 year old girls that live on your cell phone. Not everyone does. Sorry not to be a super techie such as yourself!! Here’s an idea for all you crybabies that whine how terrible Facebook is. Make your own multimillion dollar social Media. Offer it for free and then YOU take all the shit everyone gives you on how to run YOUR FREE PROGRAM!! If you don’t like Facebook get the fuck off of it and pay for what you want THEN you have a right to bitch. Until that time shut the fuck up and move on!!!

      • Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are part of your overall digital presence, which also includes a website, email marketing, and SEO. You need a presence everywhere for maximum reach. Also having a presence everywhere means that if one channel not controlled by you experiences some grade-A BS like noted above, you aren’t totally boned.

      • You must realize most businesses even those with real website an even store fronts use Facebook to keep in contact with their clients an community about upcoming events and its not right to discriminat on one type of business there’s lots of business’s people don’t agree with that use Facebook to communicate with the community an you don’t see them being shut down

    • I was going to quit Facebook right around the time people started to wise up to the fact that if you are receiving a “service” for free that you are actually the product, and that Facebook was using your personal information to sell targeted adds to google and other aggregators.

      Here is why I didn’t though, you see right around that time when so much attention was being paid to their privacy policy and terms of usage agreement wherein it was found that when you “delete” your account all your data and postings becomes Facebook’s property and they essentially just archive all your shit and continue to use your information for their gains. It was even explained how they can use their last snapshot of you, your browsing habits, last known location etc 3rd party data aggregators can continue to target ads/services to you via a rough triangulation.

      So I didn’t, because if they are going to be profiting from my personal information and data even if I terminate the relationship, then I am going to continue to utilize the service, and if they are going to hang on to all my data I might as well maintain some semblance of control over it.

      • They’re already doing all that. Everything you’ve ever done via FB is archived and “used against you” from the moment you put it out there. Same with all customer “accounts”. We are the products being traded, and it’s all very sophisticated data-mining through tracking your digital footprint.

        Want to be anonymous? Too late! Dump your personal electronics and use cash. Wear hoodies over low-billed ball caps with dark sunglasses. No logos, all non-descript. Get an old carbureted vehicle. No onstar or satellite radio. Only use burner phones.

        Gee, notice how one has to behave like an enemy of the state just to be left alone?

        • yup, and they can use “I pooped in my toaster today.” for whatever they want.

          If you use it for just mind numbing crap, well, Id say the jokes on facebook and whoever is buying the crap.

    • Quitting Facebook isn’t a solution. Facebook has 4 billion users. Half the world, basically. Facebook would survive if every single American deleted their account and Zuckerberg moved to China.

      My proposed solution is to overwhelm the artificial intelligence tasked with finding firearm-related content. Post a picture of a cat labeled “Glock 19”. Post a picture of a dog labeled “H&K 416D”. Post a picture of a pile of shit and label it “Hi-Point” or “Kel-Tec”…you get the idea. Then you post pictures of actual guns that are labeled “tea with Martha” or “at the beach”. If enough people do this, it will make things harder for Facebook. Decreasing the number of accounts their AI has to sift through will only make it easier.

      • Agree with your suggestion of overloading FB’s algorithms. But would like to say that FB does care about the US market. It is not the number of users that matter, it is the number of advertisers.

      • Facebook has at most generous 1.6B users. Of those I know who are still on FB, they all have 5 or 6 accounts, and even FB itself estimates that between 5% and 12% of accounts are fakes.

        My personal estimate from reading the literature is it might be right around a billion. And that’s a big maybe.

      • Yes it is a solution. I’ve been living just fine without Facebook for the decades before it was created and the last five years since I’ve deactivated my account.

      • To save the next person the trouble of scrolling way up, that’s in reply to:

        This is why I quit Facebook years ago. I don’t like totalitarian dictatorships that pose as communities of free expression. Mark Zuckerberg can go piss up a rope. — Pwrserge

    • Isn’t it interesting that Facebook, a platform built largely on ILLEGALLY OBTAINED, COPYRIGHT VIOLATING content, is targeting LEGAL businesses selling a LEGAL product in a LEGAL way, and they think they are doing the world a favor – or perhaps this is just another one of their twisted psychology tests.

  3. My local group got the hammer. Total wreck since it was a much nicer and more reliable way to sell things vs the forum page. I guess it’s about time I blacklisted Facebook.

    • I just deleted my account this morning. FB is also deleting all of the medical marijuana groups as of today. While I don’t partake in the activity, I don’t like this American moms and puritan standards it is enforcing.

      • Just a heads up, your account doesn’t actually delete, FB just “deactivates” it. Be sure to sanitize ALL your stuff before you deactivate.

  4. Screw social media! Bunch of progressive liberal back Stabbing Bitchs. I grew up in the late seventies and eighties Way before computers and the Internet, And I was able to get through those years without it no problems. Today people Get on that crap every 15 minutes and let you know when they’re going to take a shit I don’t really need to know when somebody’s going to take a shit. It was designed by a snot nosed little brat Anyways!I know I’m just poking at technology Because I grew up in the old school days, But it does suck when you have A community in which you participate Leave you high and dry because of their Progressive liberal thoughts and actions and ways. They suck!

    • Seems as if you haven’t taken or given a shit today, better check your facebook and make sure! 🙂

      I deleted my FB about 2 years ago and they kept emailing me to re-activate it, had to unsubscribe from their spam emails several times but I bet my page would re-appear instantly if I went and logged in now. The internet is forever…

    • “This is why you don’t use someone else’s sandbox to build your community.”

      You have a point.

      TTAG, nail down GunLocker.com, Amazon still has no problem whoring out their scaleable server empire, no?…

      • No they don’t, they need to be exposed for being anti-liberty and wielding authoritarian control over their own servers. People seem to forget that Facebook owns the content you put on their servers.

      • Facebook isn’t a monolopy…

        It’s a privately-owned website that you CHOOSE to join and be a part of. Their website, their rules and your 1st Amendment rights do not apply there.

        If you don’t like it, then join the rest of us that don’t use it.

        • Show me three competitors to Facebook’s services… They have a monopoly and should be broken up. Lack of competition leads to companies imposing garbage like this. Or do we need to wait for Facebook to require all transactions to happen through the Facebook store using Facebook money where they set the exchange rate?

        • ~315MM monthly Twitter users, ~400MM on Instagram

          Theoretically (like all those numbers) about 1.6B on Facebook.

          Had everyone a smartphone back in the day, we’d be bitching about MySpace, or maybe even Six Degrees. Though neither was quite as evil as a Zuckerberg, so who knows.

        • Apples and oranges. Twitter is not in the same business. It’s like comparing Skype to a phone company.

        • Chip, we are talking companies and not websites.

          Twitter owns Vine
          Google+ and YouTube are owned by Google
          Instagram is Facebook

          • Chip, we are talking companies and not websites.

            No, we’re talking about services provided by an alleged monopoly – specifically, social media services. In the social media service space, Facebook has many competitors; they are not a monopoly.

        • pwrserge, Twitter is in direct competition with Facebook. Facebook the company owns Instagram and those two services are in fact direct competition for each other.

        • Mecha, as pwrserge noted, that’s like saying that a movie theater and a football team are in direct competition. Sure, they both vie for your entertainment budget, but the products are completely different.

        • Chip,

          Monopolies are not websites. Monopolies are companies. Google owns 2 of the social media websites you listed. Facebook owns one of the websites you said competes with Facebook – Instagram??? Twitter owns Twitter and Vine. While I agree with you that Facebook doesn’t have a monopoly, I was correcting you on your use of the websites in your argument (mostly because you included Facebook’s Instagram).

          • I was correcting you on your use of the websites in your argument (mostly because you included Facebook’s Instagram).

            One company can own multiple services that compete against each other. Regardless, it is a distinction without a difference, in the question of whether or not Facebook (i.e. the Facebook social media service, not the parent company that owns both the Facebook social media service and the Instagram social media service) is a monopoly in the social media services market.

            Facebook.com is not a monopoly within the social media services market. Facebook, Inc. does not have a monopoly in the social media services market due to services provided via facebook.com.

        • 16V. That analogy does not make sense. Instagram and Twitter are in direct competition with each other as they are very similar services. Instagram is wholly owned by Facebook. Therefore, Twitter is in direct competition with Facebook.

          My case is like this: Sony and Microsoft are in direct competition with each other. Sony is also in direct competition with Disney. However, Disney and Microsoft are not in direct competition with each other. How can those statements all be true (which they are)???? Sony and Microsoft compete over Game Consoles. Sony and Disney compete over movie productions. Microsoft doesn’t make movies and Disney doesn’t make game consoles so they do not compete with each other there.

        • ” It’s like comparing Skype to a phone company.”

          Skype IS a phone service and I use it as such, as do millions of other users. So it’s a completely accurate comparison.
          You don’t even know what you’re talking about.

        • mecha75, I’ll admit that I have not used either service in a while, but last I checked, Twitter is a platform where you can use up to 140 characters (though I’ve heard that’s going up), and Instagram was aimed at photos.

          How are these two disparate platforms the same? By that metric, throw Snapchat in as well? Just because they’re called ‘social media’? They all have a different use, and I just don’t understand how they compete – most of the millenial consumers of FB, have Instagram and Twitter handles. Once again, there’s competition for your eyeballs and the mush that was your brain, but the only current FB ‘competitor’ is Google+, and we all know well that’s working out…

      • You can’t be a monopoly if you don’t charge anything. Facebook is simply a club, an organization, that its members join to be able to communicate with other members. The rules of that club are up to them and you have no recourse (nor should you, that’s the beauty of freedom).
        Now, if it turned out that the service Facebook actually provides (i.e., advertising) had a majority market share of its clients that actually pay money, it would be different. But it doesn’t. So it isn’t.

  6. “In all fairness to Facebook…”

    Faceplant is not worthy of anyone’s “fairness.” Their sandbox, they get to decide what’s fair in their sandbox.

    It’s amazing to me how many people bend over and submit to their rules. It’s time to get out of that sandbox and quit allowing Zuckerturd and his advertisers to profit from us.

    • Or how much they bitch about what they’re getting without paying a dime for it. Or how much of their privacy they are willing to give up to not pay that dime. Remember…you signed up for their free service and whored out your privacy for it. YOUR damned fault. And NOW you don’t like it when it turns out there are strings attached?

      So then when Facebook does something they don’t like, they call for siccing the government on them…break up the Facebook monopoly! Oh, that store doesn’t like me carrying a gun there…make them let me!

      Geez, I thought I’d find people of a libertarian bent here. I have, but I’ve also found a huge number of entitled brats wanting to tell people how to run their businesses.

      • Bearing arms is (supposedly) protected by the Bill of Rights; being gay is not. But a (supposedly) private business must cater to gays, but openly discriminate against the 2A group?

        • Two wrongs don’t make a right. If it’s wrong for the government to force someone to bake a cake (and I agree it most certainly is wrong), you won’t fix things by trying to pull the same crap on behalf of shooters. Instead you’ll just continue to set people at each other’s throats.

          Go after the cake baking nonsense. Don’t use it as a precedent to justify an attack on someone else’s freedom, or you implicitly concede it’s okay for pressure groups to tyrannize everyone else.

          • “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” — Killing is wrong; unless the other person is trying to kill you first. This is a war – of ideas, so far. If you use gentlemanly tactics, while the other sides unleashes unrestricted warfare, you will be as extinct as the dinosaurs. I would not suggest going above and beyond the un-tastefulness of your enemies, but giving them a taste of their own medicine should be well within the rules.

  7. So they ban legal people, selling legal products legally to other legal people?

    This is why I have never had or ever will have a Facebook account. It doesn’t matter anyways as I have built up a wonderful collection of nice AR-15s and AK’s without social media. They will not cut into or stop legal gun sales by this policy.

    • That is their right. 1st amendment rights do not apply on private property and facebook is a private company which owns that property. Stop supporting them by going to their private property.

  8. i wonder if Suckerturd walks the streets by himself…or does he have an army of gun loaded security protecting him…..he stole facebook by the way

  9. I joined faceblock for about 2 weeks and that was enough! When a company tells me to see their faceblock page I stop looking for their product. If they don’t have a blog or forum I don’t buy their product……..

  10. Facebook is a private company. They do not have to give anyone they disagree with a voice. The 1st Amendment does not apply if they wish it does not apply as those servers are owned by Facebook. It isn’t a public space. That is why I don’t go on facebook.

  12. Two things to add, one most will agree with, the other one is worth a thought before attacking me. Facebook – it is really a big waste of time, so no big loss. The second thing – much is being said in their complaint that they have made donations to various charities. Perhaps its time to realize that those charities are cesspools of socialist moochers and the more you feed them, the more they demand, while always voting against you. They truly know how to bite the hand that feeds them, but we never seem to learn to pull back the hand that’s being bitten.

  13. It’s time to use laefare against these companies. I read somewhere that several Israeli plaintiffs are going after Facebook and Twitter for enabling terrorist attacks. If Americans start publicizing Facebook’s “support” for terrorism it could create enough pressure to stop their censorship program. At the very least it might force them to ban terrorists from the site..

    • Considering the left’s delusion that gun owners are terrorists, that plan could backfire and create more censorship of gun related material.

  15. “Please keep in mind that if your appeal is denied, your Page will be permanently deleted.”

    In other words, your page doesn’t follow the Facebook terms and community standards! We aren’t going to tell you what the offending material is. You have have to guess – then appeal just one time! You only have one chance to guess what the offending material is. If your guess is incorrect – we permanently delete your page. Have a nice day.

    P.S. We hate guns.

    • That’s beautiful. It’s a message that needs to be spread far and wide. A T-shirt would great! You should start a Teespring campaign and make a little profit too.

    • I’ve never read this statement before? Is it yours? It is great and I agree it belongs on a Tshirt.

  17. Big Jim-

    I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s as well. I fully understand the hesitation to get “hooked in” to computers and social media. I was a mountain kid running around the woods, shooting BB guns and riding dirt bikes. We only had TWO TV channels.. Eek! I’m still an outdoors guy but have adapted to some modern necessities.

    Reality is, social media is the reality of modern business. There’s no stepping around it. Businesses must use it as another tool to promote their business or brand. What I vehemently disagree with is the targeting of a class of business just because of the items they sell and the controversial nature of the industry. What FB did to us may have been a big “misunderstanding” or “algorithm error”. But I find it really hard to swallow that our page admins personal accounts and business accounts were directly targeted and shut down without a live person at FB making that conscious decision. It’s censorship and it’s also a reality of the modern, privately run, government influenced social media machine. I just wish FB would value the 2nd Amendment as much as the 1st Amendment.

    • ” I just wish FB would value the 2nd Amendment as much as the 1st Amendment.”

      ummm they do. That is the point of this thread.

    • Not likely since they deleted and did not restore post and photo. Your site was not restored in an unmolested state.

  18. You know what we need? A social networking site for gun owners, gun manufacturers, and gun shops/dealers and… yep… private gun sellers.

    F Facebook.

  19. Screw Facebook sideways with a chainsaw. I don’t really care if a business uses fb, but if that’s the ONLY way to see their wares and conduct business it’s not happening.

    Now, I do have 4 young children. I realize at some point I’ll have to set up an account for whatever nonsense is around when they’re old enough to start using the net. Even then, it’s easy for them to set up alternate accounts to hide activity from parental oversight.

  20. Does anyone still believe that all this social media, built by children, for children is founded and operated by full-bodied adults? Many (if not all) of these techno-wonders lack basic social skills, mature judgement, and any reasoning powers at all. They were raised in, and remain in, a child’s fantasy land where playing nice, belief in Santa Clause, lack of restraint in anything they want to do, substitutes for skills needed to evaluate the real world (and the effects of all their childish antics). On top of which (happily) they make all sorts of money and feel guilty about it, asking us to help them through their personal “crisis”, and be tolerant of their childish behavior. Pox on them all. They have nothing of real value to bring to humanity.

    Unfortunately….these children grow in numbers, daily.

  21. Lessons learned

    #1 – Facebook is not a safe place to do business. Your ability to build and grow a marketing network is at the whims of the political and personal winds.

    #2 – Based on the description above, does that mean that when I read about gun-control groups encouraging illegal actions (i.e. calling 911 on open carry, and exaggerate claims), wishing death on gun owners, or otherwise making violent threats, that we can also report those pages?

  23. I keep saying, gun broker and other larger gun related sites are missing a huge opportunity in creating gun specific sites such as, “Gun Book” or “Shooters Tube”. Abandoning the sites that do not want the gun community is really their loss not ours.

    Facebook, Twitter etc. do not give a shit about freedom of expression unless it is the expression that they want you to have.

  24. FB has done the gun community a favor. This was inevitable, but I figured it would happen at a time of national stress.

    Now, everyone has the opportunity to rework, retrench, and establish communities and connections less dependent on one liberal billionaire, along with the luxury of doing so while we still have all of our resources. Imagine having to do that while being limited to shortwave radio.

    And I agree with the above sentiments that companies that chose to have FB or twitter as their primary online presence are missing me as a customer.

    • +1 there. A large majority of 2A supporters are moving to MeWe social site. If you can get over the name it seems to be a very viable option.

  26. From the modern Libs who brought you multiculturalism, diversity, and tolerance, which is code for degradation of the western culture, forcing everyone to agree with them by calling people racist for not doing so, and excepting people who only agree with their views and idealogies…

    Would you expect anything less?

  27. Get off of damned facecrak then. Why do people continue supporting services that are anti-freedom and have public policies that are exactly contradictory to their own? Users of facecrack are the problem and we don’t need their social justice warrior nonsense nor do we need to help them make millions from it.

  28. Facebook is doomed, one hopes.

    You can’t be a “platform” for the biases and preferences of carefully culled people just like you, and at the same time a mass platform for the unwashed, or bundle of services supporting communities you do not understand, and don’t like.

    Eventually it’ll be reduced to subscription-support by the the source-specific latte / virtue-signaling, organic tofu folks. There aren’t that many of them.

    I suspect they’ll get scavenged; nibbled to death by ducks around the edges, first in “less developed” countries who are somehow unenthusiastic about pitching their demographic weight into the pot with self-righteous Americanos who will tell them how wrong they are. (That’s what the UN and Eurozone are for – sorry, off topic. I’m bracing to deal with the eager righteous droids at my alma mater this coming Monday, so gotta get it out of my system now. Really, just hang with the 2nd-world aspirationalists: they’re there to build their world, and a life for themselves in it.)

    Facebook’s problem is… at this point, banging-up and scaling a special-interest online community ain’t that hard. Hanging ancillary services (discovery, email, collaboration, txt msgs, other protocols, SPAM-filtering, security scanning, update / patch storage, notice & push) ain’t that hard either.

    It turns out that “internet-scale” grand “audiences” of the flaccid socially-irrelevant is appealing to big thinkers uninterested in discussing anything smaller than the arc of human progress and / or the fate of the planet (at Davos.) They form The Audience. However, all services are personal and all interests are specific (just as all politics are local.) Even flatfish like these get all prickly and specific about their local interest.

    The right thinking people on FaceSpace will throw out everybody not like them, to eventually discover that they are themselves a minority, and not a very interesting one at that.

    Face-gram’s argument, now, is scale (vs. distinctive services at the start) … of audience, of interests (“content types”), of infrastructure. Driving people away from there for wrongthink is … a tad at odds with their fundamental model, and ultimately what they offer their paying customers. (Their customers, who pay, are advertisers, and to a lesser extent overlord shapers of opinion. You, the individual user are the product. Follow the money.)

    Really, people crafting their own “presence” on a portfolio of services is where it wants go go, pulled by the users, not pushed by the providers. The tug is inevitable. Spewing kabillions of “impressions” to undifferentiated “eyeballs”, many hostile to your message, contributes only to the 90% of marketing that is always wasted. It has the distinction of being *knowingly* wasteful, thus is only willfully fodder for the old joke. (“Everybody knows 90% of marketing spending is wasted. The problem is, nobody knows which 90%”)

    Wouldn’t you rather sell the latest “folding thing that goes up” to either the TTAG audience or Senator Full-Auto? As the arms race of “targeting” algorithms vs. personal attempts at privacy continues, why not promote to the self-selected? Localized communities of interest are the ultimate targeted ad community.

    Thankfully, the Zuck is fully consumed with “leaning in” on his cultural reengineering, now that he’s got his, so he won’t figure it out.

  29. I’m NO social media expert but there are other sites who won’t fook us. Anyone see MeWe or use it? My FB site is mainly to belong to other groups. And keep in touch with family. WE should spam the hell out of Zuck’s bastard creation. Hit him in the wallet. The other big guys are as bad or worse-Google +, Amazon,the evil Microsoft. Yeah GB, Auction arms or Armslist is a good place to start on an alternative to fakebook…

    • So far as I can tell, at least YouTube hasn’t gone silly like this. PLENTY of gun related content.

      I don’t know when that particular hobnail boot will drop.

  32. I quite Facebook a year ago and after about a week or two of mild withdrawal symptoms I don’t miss it at all. Facebook ‘wants people to feel safe’. That kind of wraps up the entire Social Justice Warrior progressivism movement in a single phrase. It doesn’t matter if you are safe, as long as you feeeeeeel safe. It doesn’t matter if you are actually free as long as you are free from want.

  33. I hope they are able to get their content “allowed.” Although I don’t like many things about Facebook, I use it as a platform to broadcast my extremely right wing viewpoints. There are regular TTAG readers who do the same thing. It’s a multimedia world out there. I don’t choose to be incognito – I put out politically incorrect truths on a regular basis. Many of those truths are TTAG posts.

  34. I shop at Santa Cruz Armory. They are great guys.

    What many missed,but I didn’t is that even though their page was restored it was not whole and unmolested. A recent post and photo showcasing one of their new items, a CA legal DD5 was deleted by Facebook and not restored.

    • As a licensed firearms dealer/manufacturer, we’ve asked several times to have all our content restored. Our page is still censored. I must say though, the few FB folks that have helped us through this have been very polite and helpful.

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