Dog Photo Facebook Page Supporting Sick Child Gets Shut Down

facebook_logo_flatAnthony Lyons, a 16-year-old leukemia patient in Phoenix, Arizona, loves it when the therapy dogs at the Phoenix Children’s Hospital visit him. So a family friend created a Facebook events page called “Photo Doggies for Anthony,” which invited users all over the world to share pictures of their happy pups. The heartwarming page quickly went viral and accumulated over 500,000 dog pictures. However, things went awry this week when the page was suddenly taken down.

One rude user posted pictures of a dead dog on the page, and of course, many users reported the picture to Facebook. However, instead of simply removing the picture, the whole page disappeared. The boy’s mother said that Facebook had contacted her and said they were aware of the problem. She said she wasn’t sure exactly what caused the page takedown.

“I don’t know if it was an overload of people all at once or if it was a hacker or, there was one guy posting some nasty things on there, just one and he claimed responsibility,” she said.

Thankfully, another Facebook page with dog photos was created for Anthony while the original one was down, and the replacement quickly gathered 17,000 followers. Though Facebook likely accidentally took down the page, the responsibility lies solely with the troll who posted the offensive photo. Facebook’s intention in censoring the photo was correct, but their move unfortunately went wrong. Hopefully they can correct it soon.