Bitche is back after blundering Facebook restores French town’s ‘offensive’ home page

FACEBOOK France has apologised to the eastern French town of Bitche after its algorithm wiped its municipal page, mistaking it for an English-language insult.

Bitche, population 5,205, is a picturesque citadel inside the Vosges natural park on the German border known for its 13th-century fortress, beautiful rolling countryside and forests.

However, it hit the headlines after Facebook unpublished the town hall’s page, Ville de Bitche, on the social media site last month.

“On March 19, Facebook informed us that [the page] was no longer published on the grounds that it ‘violates conditions applied to Facebook pages’,” Benôit Kieffer, the mayor of Bitche said.

Unable to retrieve the lost page, the town came up with a new name and settled for “Mairie 57230”, its postal code. While hardly eye-catching, it said it had little choice given that “the appeal procedure can last several months”. The news sparked irate online comments with one French Twitter user exclaiming that the town, which has several times resisted German invasion, had now fallen foul of “cancel culture and right-mindedness”. However, with media attention mounting, Facebook yesterday brought Bitche back to life.

“Ville de Bitche’s Facebook page is back up,” confirmed Mr Kieffer in a message on the social network and the town’s website.

“What has happened to Bitche demonstrates the failings and the limits of moderation tools that only a human eye can judge.”

Mr Kieffer invited Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, to visit Bitche

“to discover our pretty citadel” but also to “honour … the memory of his compatriots”, pointing out that the 100th US Infantry Division” had “come all the way from South Carolina” to free the town from German occupation in 1945.

Henceforth, he added: “Our liberators went on to refer to themselves with pride as the ‘Sons of Bitche’.”