New Zealand Has One Of The World's Oldest Parliaments. But Facebook Thought Its Page Was Fake

So they took it down. For nearly a week.

By
Rose Troup Buchanan
by Rose Troup Buchanan

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Hi, everyone. So. New Zealand is a small (but great) country.

Wikimedia

This is its parliament. It was established in 1854 and is one of the oldest continuously functioning parliaments in the world.

David Gray / Reuters

(Sidenote: This building has not been around since the 19th century.)

On July 20, the New Zealand Parliament's official Facebook page was taken down entirely by the international social media network.

BBC

The page, which has just over 500 followers, remained down all of that week.

Facebook

Much to the confusion of staffers at parliament.

Lionsgate

A spokesperson for the New Zealand Parliament told BuzzFeed News that they had been working with Facebook to "resolve the situation." The spokesperson continued — after the page was created on July 4, "an issue arose surrounding the authenticity of the administering account."

Eventually, on July 26, it reappeared back online.

Facebook: NZParliament

As of Friday, there were only four comments on the post announcing the page's return, which doesn't seem to imply that many people really missed it.

In a comment to BuzzFeed News, a spokesperson for Facebook said that under its "automated system," the company identifies accounts "that are potentially fake."

“Under our policies, all accounts must be authentic," the spokesperson said. The Facebook spokesperson continued: "Where an account is identified as fake and it administers a Page, the operation of the Page may be impacted. We worked with the New Zealand Parliament to restore their access to the Page.”

Basically, it seems to be yet ANOTHER example of people thinking New Zealand isn't a real country. Sorry, New Zealand.

20th Century Fox

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