Emails reveal Facebook tried to reach out to Diamond and Silk over changes: report

Facebook reached out to pro-Trump vloggers Diamond and Silk days before the duo claimed that they had not heard from the social media company about why their page was deemed “unsafe for the community.”

Emails obtained by conservative writer Erick Erickson’s blog “The Resurgent” show that the company tried contacting Diamond and Silk on Monday. Erickson also reported that the company tried calling them twice on Tuesday.

One email, which was sent to private addresses associated with the duo’s Facebook accounts, explained that the website had introduced new guidelines for accounts eligible to earn money through Facebook in September of last year.

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The email, from Facebook public policy manager Neil Potts, acknowledged that the company did not adequately communicate the new guidelines to Diamond and Silk and said that restrictions on their page would be lifted to allow them to apply to monetize their content.

“We did not properly communicate these policies to you,” the email reads. “As a result, you could not have known that the video content on your Page was not in line with our eligibility standards and did not qualify for monetization features.”

The email also apologized for the company’s claim that the Diamond and Silk Facebook page was “unsafe for the community,” saying that the notification was “inaccurate and not reflective of the way we communicate with our community and the people who run Pages on our platform.”

Potts sent a follow-up email to Diamond and Silk’s public accounts on that same day, notifying them of the initial email.

When Diamond and Silk did not reply to the emails, Facebook told Erickson that it tried unsuccessfully to contact the women by phone on April 10. 

The emails appear to contradict the duo’s claim on the “Mornings on the Mall” radio show on Wednesday that Facebook had not tried to contact them. 

Diamond and Silk, whose real names are Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, respectively, have railed against Facebook in recent days for labeling their content “unsafe to the community.”

The two women have claimed that starting in September of last year they observed that their 1.2 million Facebook followers were not getting the usual alerts whenever they posted new content – a date aligning with Facebook’s new monetization guidelines.