‘Manjapada’ aka Yellow Army, the famed fan base of the Indian Super League team Kerala Blasters FC (KBFC), suffered a major blow after its official Facebook group with over two lakh followers was taken down by the social media giant.
To make matters worse, the fans’ Facebook page with over three lakh followers also seem to be in danger.
Social media war
A social media war of sorts was raging between the fans of KBFC and the Indonesian football club Persib Bandung ever since they were pitched against each other in the third round of an unofficial contest conducted by a little known Twitter handle to find out the football club with the largest fan base.
At the end of what turned out to be a slugfest marked by quite smutty and provocative online campaign, KBFC pipped their Indonesian counterparts.
KBFC fans celebrated it by taunting and raising the cacophony level on the Facebook page of their rivals who have now allegedly got back by targeting the immensely popular social media platforms of Manjapada.
“Usually, we are careful about admitting anyone into our group. Yet, someone seems to have managed to intrude into our Facebook group, posted something and got it reported. Since thousands of posts were getting approved in the group since the Twitter contest we could not pinpoint the damaging post. But we still have no clue why our group was taken down by Facebook without any warning,” said Somu P. Joseph, one of the admins of the group and working committee member of Manjapada.
Unpublished status
Though, they have turned the Facebook page into ‘unpublished’ status to safeguard it from spamming, it seems to be on the verge of being deactivated, if not already so.
“When a Facebook page is turned ‘unpublished’, it will not be visible and even if it happens to be visible visitors will not be able to access it. But even then admins usually still retain access rights to settings, which has not happened in this case giving us the impression that it was also in danger of being deactivated. However, we have approached Facebook and we may be able to retain our page after all,” said Mr. Joseph.
Manjapada has deactivated its Instagram account in an effort to safeguard it from spamming. With the fourth round of the fans’ contest against the Turkish club Galatasaray looming large, Manjapada desperately needs its social media in full swing to mobilise support and the present crisis seems to have hit those plans, pretty badly.
