A few weeks ago, Hannah Smith, a 23-year-old Fort Collins, Colorado, resident who works at her family’s CBD products company, Joy Organics, got a call from her mom, asking why their Facebook page wasn’t working. Her mother assumed the password had been changed, or that someone had switched admin permissions. When Smith tried logging on herself, she found that Facebook had unpublished the Joy Organics Facebook page, flagging the business for “promoting the sale of prescription pharmaceuticals.”
Smith tried to file an appeal, but her claim was denied. She started a petition, which has received nearly 3,000 signatures. When she reached out to contacts in the CBD industry, she learned that many other CBD companies in North Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado, and Kentucky had had their Facebook pages shut down. According to the Boston Globe, at least six CBD companies in Massachusetts saw their accounts on Facebook-owned Instagram shut down as well.
In an email on Monday morning, Facebook admitted that its team had erroneously removed CBD and hemp pages.