Our five (5) Facebook accounts were disabled for the same reasons: "Promotion"

Question

After discovering that Facebook has fragile features, 5 fellow blog publishers and I decided to join together to work as a team. Our major use of Facebook has been to share our blog posts using our 6 accounts interchangeably. Additionally, we have been shortening our post links by using Bitly.com.

We have been working together while using the same 6 accounts for more than a year now. Moreover, our use of Facebook has been exactly the same and we have never ever faced a problem of account disable from then to July this year.

Our 5 accounts--one by one--has been disabled by Facebook from July this year, and as I'm writing this to you, this is only running account--the rest have been disabled!

It happened that in the morning times, while login into our accounts we have been finding the disable messages. As we sent our original IDs to Facebook for review, we got exactly the same message that claims that we have been disabled for violating Facebook terms: "PROMOTION"!!!

We have been seeking for clearer explanation online in vain. We have also been asking the Facebook team to explain to us more--no reply. We are really disappointed because we are wondering why Facebook is currently treating our blog posts as promotion. Astonishingly, we don't do anything different from what we used to do before, and moreover, we don't do anything different from other users who share blog posts on Facebook. Again, we don't ask people to click on our posts in a promotional way. And additionally, our blogs are not based on promotion--they are based on social matters and breaking news.

Please, please, please...we need explanation for we are really afraid that if we don't get answer and try to rectify our wrongs, we will never be safe on Facebook.

Here is the email we have been receiving from the Facebook team after sending our ids for review:

"Your account has been disabled because you violated Facebook's Terms. We disable users who send unsolicited messages and create objects for the sole purpose of promoting or advertising a product, service, or opportunity.

One or several of the pieces of content you are responsible for were identified as engaging in such activity. Some examples of this include:

• Encouraging shares, likes or clicks under false pretenses, defined as
• Failing to enable promised functionality
• Failing to deliver promised reward
• Failing to direct to promised content
• Encouraging shares, likes or clicks that result in the compromise of a user's security
• Requiring or requesting the copying and pasting of JavaScript code
• Maintaining pages dedicated solely to the promotion of online giveaways

Unfortunately, we will not reactivate your account for any reason."

Answer 1

It seems what you are referring is called "voting rings" on sites like Stack Exchange, Reddit and any voting site.

Sometimes, users in social networks might reach out to their friends (or even create fake accounts) in order to “seed vote” their submissions. This is obviously a form of playing the system - http://blog.algorithmia.com/post/124542129914/mining-product-hunt-detecting-vote-rings

In your case, I'm not sure what the correct phrase to be used on Facebook will be. For example on this site, rings result in automatic bans.

After discovering that Facebook has fragile features, 5 fellow blog publishers and I decided to join together to work as a team.

You could have just used a Facebook fan page and added the 5 team members there. Facebook is pretty much against promotions like this on personal accounts

Promotions may be administered on Pages or within apps on Facebook. Personal Timelines and friend connections must not be used to administer promotions (ex: “share on your Timeline to enter” or “share on your friend's Timeline to get additional entries”, and "tag your friends in this post to enter" are not permitted).

https://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php#promotionsguidelines

So you have already have one strike here

Our major use of Facebook has been to share our blog posts using our 6 accounts interchangeably

This is a second violation under "Registration and Account Security" in https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms

1. You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.
2. You will not create more than one personal account.
3. If we disable your account, you will not create another one without our permission.
4. You will not use your personal timeline primarily for your own commercial gain, and will use a Facebook Page for such purposes.

Our 5 accounts--one by one--has been disabled by Facebook from July this year, and as I'm writing this to you, this is only running account--the rest have been disabled!

This just seems like someone either reported you or the Policy Team finally caught up to your antics.

To break down this "promoting or advertising a product, service, or opportunity." means that you and your team have been advertising content specifically through the use of bit.ly since you want to see the click conversions and you have been using your personal accounts to boost newsfeed space which would otherwise not be possible with a Facebook fan page. Since Facebook already provides tools to see these clicks and views there is no need for you to do this.

So going forward you need to

1. Create a page for you and your team
2. Stop using bit.ly
3. Start using Open Graph meta data for your websites
4. Create an app for these websites to follow the analytic/insights data that comes from it https://www.facebook.com/insights