TEN YEARS OF MADNESS: THE U MAD STORY PART III

Being a content creator isn’t easy when you first make a page. For the most part, you are posting for yourself because your reach is so low. I’d say a page doesn’t become a page until you get at least 1,000 likes, and then you’re off to the races. When U MAD got deleted for the first time, I was in that very position. I would post memes all day, but I wasn’t getting any traction. So, I decided to create a story that would get everyone’s attention. Now, 2013 is the year where hoaxes and fake news really began, and I would take advantage of that. In the winter of 2013, U MAD used hoax generator and created our first “Tyler Perry” story. The story was so absurd that we didn’t think people would believe it. The first story we created was that Tyler Perry was pulled out of his SUV by a bunch of Mexican landscapers on the highway, & almost beat him to death. The story caught on like wildfire. The post had thousands and thousands of shares, and over a million reach. The story got U MAD to over 2,000 likes, and that got us to the number we had before deletion. People were really engaged in the story, there were so many people wishing him a speedy recovery and whatnot. The story gained so much media attention that it actually got back to Tyler Perry.

 

However, we weren’t satisfied, and we decided to create another story to generate more views. We decided to play on the rumors of his sexuality, or at least play on it. We created the story that he had come out the closet. And once again, the story went viral to bunch of people who were mostly supportive about the faux revelation.

 

For months, we were riding the wave of momentum until we started posting really inappropriate shit like rape jokes, death jokes, racist jokes, and feuding with troll accounts who had axes to grind with our page. Two trolls in particular come to mind named Richard Clutch & Amy something (I forget her last name). We probably pushed things too much at this point, and it costed us U MAD for the second time. These two trolls were relentless, and they probably costed us the page. Eventually we won the battle but lost the war.

 

We weren’t down this time, and we regrouped rather quickly & just made another page. And within a month, we had another page at 1,000 likes.

 

 

2013 is when Facebook started to crack down on content. This time period is when Facebook started to become what you see today. Zuckerberg started disabling pages, handing out 3 days, 7 days, 2 weeks or 30-day Facebook Jail stint to habitual offenders. This type of censorship began to handicap pages like ours. It had gotten to the point where everyday a post on our page was getting reported thus sending me or other admins to Facebook jail. We had to adapt or perish.