Flathead National Forest lost Facebook privileges during avalanche season

Flathead National Forest was without its main portal for pushing safety information to the public for six months at the beginning of 2022 after losing its ability to post on Facebook for unspecified reasons.

The organization lost full posting privileges on the popular social media platform from January 26 until June 11, including being unable to post original content until April 20. The group could share content from other users during that time, but could only post text from April 20 until June 11, when their image posting capabilities were restored.

According to Flathead Forest spokeswoman Tami MacKenzie, the downtime came despite repeated requests for an explanation and resolution.

“When you are not a business and you don’t bring in advertising dollars for Facebook, then they are very slow to help you out,” MacKenzie said. “It’s been a total nightmare. The most frustrating part was that every time we submitted a request for help through their system, we never got a response. Not once.”

The exact cause of the situation is unknown, but the inability for the Forest Service to post to the Facebook page came shortly after the group shared an image of snow covered trees in the Whitefish Range, leading to speculation the shape and bend of the trees crossed some unseen line.

Whitefish Mountain Resort, which shared a similar image on their Instagram page, deleted the post shortly after learning of the Flathead Forest’s predicament.

“We didn’t receive any complaints about the image, but we pulled it down as a precaution,” the resort’s Public Relations Manager Chad Sokol said.

In the meantime, MacKenzie and the forest service were left searching for answers while unable to share regular safety information.

“I had to ask every week about what was happening and they kept saying that it was being worked on and we should be patient. I know there were some people at Facebook that were getting annoyed with me, but it had been months since the problem started,” she said. “I think the biggest story in all of this is what we missed while we were down. We couldn’t report on avalanche danger. We couldn’t post safety messages. We missed road closures and campground openings.”

Without Facebook as an option, MacKenzie said the Forest Service was forced to put out more press releases than normal during the winter months along with posting more stories on their webpage than they had in previous years.

These options helped get important information out to the public, but MacKenzie says Facebook routinely reaches thousands of people the other methods may have missed.

While the forest service may not have been able to get out important avalanche safety messages for most of the winter, MacKenzie is glad the organization’s posting ability has returned in time for fire season.

“I think [Facebook] finally understood that we deal with important issues. Avalanche danger didn’t seem to get their attention, but mentioning fire sure made things speed up,” she said. “I guess some people don’t really understand the dangers of snow, but they sure understand fire.”