BBM Channels has hit it’s first serious bump in the road on its way to becoming a serious social network. Without any warning, a number of BBM Channels became Deleted Channels, and only a terse email explaining that the channel violated the community guidelines and that there is no option to appeal:
Your BBM Channel violates the BBM Channels content guidelines and has been deleted. This decision is final; you will be unable to add subscribers or post content to this channel anymore.
– BBM Channel Admin
The channel “wallpaper swap” was one of those deleted. Since then it has reappeared but only because of the efforts of the channel owner, who took to Twitter to complain about the unfair deletion.
The BBM team have acknowledged that there is work to be done, through this statement on their official BBM channel:
Thanks to those users who shared that we had mistakenly disabled channels from legitimate channels like Wallpaper Swap C00106B93.
We’re fine-tuning our moderation process to ensure posts and comments follow our community standards. Here’s how you can help:
– please report users posting inappropriate content or spamming comments
– channel owners: please block abusive users from your channel.
– The BBM Channel
You could argue that BBM seen to be missing the point of their own post as there is a huge number of spam in the comments here.
The real concern is that there seems to be no clear line of communication between BBM and channel owners. Unless you are a major brand and gave the privilege of dealing with a BlackBerry Channels manager, you will be stuck hoping that your own channel doesn’t get a red card.
No doubt that BBM Channels will be rolled out onto Android and iOS devices very soon. BlackBerry really need to address these issues if they want to make BBM the social platform that they need it to be. If you can’t be sure that you won’t be the victim of deleted channels, then you can’t have confidence in the platform.
