FACEBOOK has shut down the account of a community newspaper in Wiveliscombe just weeks after it was created.

The Wiveliscombe Messenger page attracted 215 followers in its short existence and experienced "good post-engagement to post-reach ratios and fabulous amounts of sharing".

The Messenger editor Lucy Sloan said the page was shutdown by Facebook just as its latest post about Wivey Pool was nearing 2,000 hits.

She said: "The reason given was that we had engaged in activity unsuitable for the Facebook community.

"Given what you can find on Facebook, it was a surprising analysis of our cheerful community news posts.

"People who know more about these things than me have suggested that we may have fallen foul of the push against ‘fake news’ at Facebook owing to the build up to the US election.

"That post on Wivey Pool had included the words, ‘government’, ‘rules’, ‘regulations’ and ‘Covid’, and it is possible that the algorithms picked these up, and so shut us down.

"I appealed, but that only led to the account being disabled."