Earlier this month Facebook created a substantial amount of chaos by suspending page recommendations from millions of business page owners around the world. Business owners running pages associated with wineries, breweries, distilleries, and related businesses were particularly hard hit.
On or about January 9th, a notification from Facebook, delivered via email, Facebook notification, or both, informed page owners that their pages would no longer be recommended as they violated the company’s community standards. The page recommendations were listed as “Suspended.”
Typically when page owners have violations of some sort, there is an opportunity to ask for a review. However, in this case, the company provided none.
In essence, Facebook told page owners they were doing something wrong, didn’t tell them what, and didn’t give them any means to do something about it. As a result, many users spent a substantial amount of time and money investigating the problem in hopes of resolving it.
Now, it appears that the company has provided some avenue for resolution – maybe. On Saturday, January 17th, the company added an option to request a review for people whose page recommendations were suspended. (One user reported that it was under Page settings > Page Status > Extra Features > Recommendations; I am not able to confirm this as my page recommendations were restored earlier this week.)
For the review, the company provided a radio button with the following options:
I think the recommendation guidelines should change to recommend Pages like mine.
I think the technology misunderstood my intent or the context of my posts.
I don’t think my content goes against the recommendation guidelines.
I’ve seen similar Pages that seemed to be recommended by Facebook.
On the one hand, this is good news. It’s clear that Facebook has awareness of the issue that its algorithms created.
On the other hand, its bad news, as Facebook’s developers clearly don’t understand the size, scope, or real issue with the problem that their algorithms created. Why do I say this? The radio buttons provided make no logical sense!
In requesting a review, users have to pick one of the options. The problem is that almost all of the options are true!
Did the technology misunderstand the intent and content of millions of users’ posts? Yes!
I don’t think this content goes against community standards. Yes!
Are similar pages still being recommended? Yes!
I don’t believe that many are asking Facebook to change their page recommendation guidelines. Rather, businesses are asking the company to adhere to its own guidelines, which they are not! (Note: If you do request a review, make sure age-restrictions for your page are properly set first. Also, if you’re adding an age restriction, it will remove your page from any groups it is part of.)
It’s great that Facebook did something to attempt to address this issue. It gives users a potential path to resolution, again, maybe.
However, these decisions will still be made algorithmically. Human beings will not be looking at these decisions.
As the original problem was algorithmic, there’s nothing to say that the code won’t make the same mistake again and either a) deny the request or b) accept the request, restore page recommendations, and then subsequently take them away again!
To wit, even prior to Facebook adding the “Request Review” option, some users had their recommendations restored without taking any action. Some subsequently had their recommendations suspended again! Talk about head spinning. Others had their page recommendations restored, and they continue to recommend the pages. (Northwest Wine Report sits in this category, at present.)
Overall, this continues to be a mess of Facebook’s own making. It’s progress that the company added the opportunity to request a review, but they screwed up the radio buttons. Badly. This shows that they don’t truly understand the issue. Given that, it’s hard to see how they will actually fix it.
Meanwhile, more than a week in, Facebook still hasn’t said a peep about an issue that has affected millions of business page owners. Equally importantly, the company doesn’t seem to have any awareness of the amount of ill will that this problem has generated.
See previous articles on this issue below.
Meta changes sow confusion, concern in wine industry (1/11/2026)
What’s going on at Meta? (1/14/2026)
On Facebook page recommendations (1/15/2026)
Meta’s silence on page recommendation suspensions deafening (1/16/2026)
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I’d love to know if anyone has luck after requesting a review. I tried this and the result came back very quickly – our page is still not “following the rules.” It seems to be suggesting that our name (which includes the word “winery”) is the source of the violation. Since requesting the review and receiving that response, the option to leave a review no longer shows up.
Jessica, I’m sorry to hear about this. I’m planning on running a poll on my Northwest Wine Report Facebook page later this week to see what people’s current status is. I expect the results from people asking for reviews to be mixed, at best.
Hi Jessica, I run The Wine Country’s (Long Beach, CA) web and social media. We recently had this problem, and our FB page would switch between being recommended and not recommended.
I suggest making sure you have two admins running your FB/Meta business dashboard, as that seemed to be one of the issues with our page (they are extremely vague, as you know, about what a recommendable page should look like).
Also, at every single turn, I left feedback expressing my dissatisfaction. As in, every time they ask for feedback, give it and do not hold back. The first time I did that, our page got restored very quickly. Then, inexplicably it was not recommendable again after some hours. Then, I left even more feedback and requested a formal review. Something something squeaky wheel. They made us recommendable again and it’s now been a couple days with no change to that.
Hope some of these actions can help you too.
Claire, thanks for the thoughts!
One thing to understand about Facebook is, given their billions of users and trillions of posts, almost all decisions like this (positive, negative, or otherwise) are made by algorithms. It would be an extreme rarity for a person to look at something. Similarly, I’m sure that any feedback is parsed by AI and categorized by AI. AI then likely rolls it up in some fashion too. It’s an open question what happens after that.
It’s part of the difficulty of this situation. When something goes amiss, it’s a challenge to figure out what to do.
I’ll tell a story that exemplifies what I said above. My brother saw a post on Facebook talking about the ’70s game Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. He commented with the commercial’s line, “I’ll knock your block off!”
He was subsequently banned from Facebook for two weeks. He appealed this and received an instantaneous, robo denial.
Similarly, the problems that Facebook is having with page recommendations are all algorithmic. I believe that there’s an error (bug) in those algorithms that has caused a substantial amount of chaos for business owners with page recommendations. It’s something that the company will need to address on their end, though there are things users can do as well, such as make sure age restrictions are correct and ask for a review.
Mine is suspended since November last year, with no specific reason.