Facebook, on Monday, took down the Facebook page for celebrity news and gossip site The Shade Room. The page, which was verified, had more than 4.4 million likes.
The Shade Room’s 25-year-old founder, Nigerian Angie Nwandu — who made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Media list this year — told a journalist on Monday that she doesn’t know why Facebook took the page down.
While the move has many in the web content community raising their eyebrows, the internet giant says that the move was fueled by concerns about copyright infringement.
Facebook told “CNN Money” that the page for the “Shade Room,” a go-to site for entertainment and celebrity gossip about black celebrities that began on Instagram, was removed due to “repeated” intellectual property violations.
The company cited its policy to “disable the accounts of people who repeatedly infringe others’ intellectual property rights when appropriate.”
The Shaderoom launched on Instagram and Twitter simultaneously, although it failed to gain in popularity on Twitter until recently when Nwandu was named one of Time‘s influential bloggers.
With The Shade Room’s growing influence come an increasing number of complaints from celebrities who are angry about content that’s been made public, and the site has run into this problem before.
Instagram (owned by Facebook) briefly shut down The Shade Room’s account last year. In that instance, BuzzFeed reported that the shutdown appeared to be related to an actress reporting the account to Instagram.
“We wrongly removed an account in this case and worked to fix the error as soon as we learned of it. We apologize for the mistake,” an Instagram spokesperson revealed to Buzzfeed.
Nwandu temporarily made The Shade Room’s Instagram account private on Monday saying, “We wanted to protect our other accounts until we knew what was going on.” That account is now back up.
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