Page restored for Black Zebra, team covering Sacramento protests, after Facebook disabled it
An independent media organization that has produced widely viewed livestreams of recent protest demonstrations in Sacramento had its Facebook page disabled for several hours Tuesday, stirring outrage and confusion from its owners and viewers.
Black Zebra Productions, which was hired by The Sacramento Bee on a freelance basis and given press credentials to record the protests to produce documentaries, routinely streamed video to thousands of viewers on the social media site while showing local demonstrations that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Khanstoshea Zingapan said she and her husband, Jeoffrey Zingapan, who founded and run Black Zebra together, had access to the page as of 5 a.m. Around 10 a.m., they were notified that Facebook had “removed or disabled access to the following content,” the Black Zebra Productions page, “for violating the Facebook Terms of Service,” a screenshot of the removal message shows.
At 2:26 p.m., the couple’s page was restored, though some links were broken and its Facebook URL had changed.
Khanstoshea told The Bee that the ban came without prior warning, and the only further explanation given by Facebook referenced a violation of the site’s “fraud” policies.
“I’m not understanding what’s going on ... The stuff that we have been doing is straight, live content,” she said. “I don’t know how anything could be fraudulent.”
Black Zebra’s multi-hour coverage was streamed directly to Facebook Live, meaning the Zingapans will not be able to regain access to most of the video they shot until the page gets restored.
“Just gone,” Khanstoshea said.
She said she has appealed the removal and is awaiting a response. As of noon Tuesday, the page remained unavailable on Facebook.
Facebook did not respond to The Bee’s request for comment from its legal team.
The Zingapans said they started Black Zebra Productions in 2016 and have never had anything like this happen before. Jeoffrey Zingapan said the Facebook page had about 11,000 followers when it was disabled.
“It’s just pretty crazy,” Khanstoshea Zingapan said. “We’re community-engaged media and it seems as though our freedom of press, First Amendment rights, are being censored and taken away from us.”
She added that she has a “hard time believing” the site’s given reason for the terms of service violation, regarding fraudulent activity.
The Zingapans plan to move their livestreams to an independent website, www.travelwithblackzebra.com. The site describes Black Zebra as an “international, volunteer, community-based program that brings film industry professionals together to create meaningful film projects.”
Black Zebra’s Instagram page, @blackzebrapro, remained live — the platform is also owned by Facebook.
The Bee hired Black Zebra on a freelance basis. The Bee announced the relationship via social media last week. The documentary footage gathered for The Bee will be independent of the outlet’s livestreams.
“Black Zebra has brought an important perspective to this community, particularly over the last two weeks,” said Lauren Gustus, president and editor of The Bee. “The Bee continues to support its documentary efforts and will support the filmmakers as they work to recover their materials.“
Protest marches on city streets were mostly peaceful in the days following the death of Floyd on Memorial Day, but with May 30 and May 31 ending in property damage and vandalism in downtown Sacramento.
The Black Zebra team was briefly detained June 1, the first night of a mandatory citywide curfew that was lifted this past weekend, while recording on a public sidewalk. The crew was detained despite displaying credentials issued by The Sacramento Bee.
“The (Sacramento) Police Department has assured us that moving forward, Black Zebra will be afforded the same freedoms to report as other media outlets,” The Bee tweeted last week. “We appreciate the Police Department’s cooperation.”
This story was originally published June 9, 2020 at 1:15 PM.
