Facebook disables UK entrepreneur's account

UK entrepreneur Raj Anand, founded of kwiqq, has had his Facebook account disabled after he individually emailed all his friends and members of a Facebook group he runs. Anand recently launched an independent social network for Salsa dancers in Brighton and set up a Facebook group to support it. It was this group he was contacting.

As he blogs today:

I have spent god knows how many hours building my profile on Facebook. Inviting friends, building facebook applications and adding value to Facebook. Recommending this rather stupid social network to my clients and friends. The least I want to do is use the facilities to contact users on my network and tell them about things they are genuinely interested in.

He is now talking about setting up a “new social network for people who have been banned from Facebook.I know there is Robert Scoble who would potentially join me.”

I have contacted Facebook for comment and will post it here when I get it.

Update: Despite having a PR person call to to say they were going to call me about this… no-one called. But events too over anyway. Facebook re-instated his account, saying:

“Please refrain from sending the same message or repeating the same post, as further violations of our Terms will result in your account being permanently disabled. If you would like to spread the word about an organization you are starting, I recommend that you use our Groups feature to share information with other users.  You may also want to consider using our new Pages feature.”