Polandball on Facebook

To see how to avoid censorship on Facebook, see /Getting around censorship

Polandball on Facebook has a history stemming shortly after the meme was first created, being the oldest Polandball community on the internet. Its community is now semi-knit and was once guided by a single page which is well known for having the most followed English Polandball outlet on the internet. It has over 350,000 fans on Facebook. The page is also famous for being one of the few survivors of a permanent Facebook ban, as it was repealed internally on February 14, 2017.

History

Polandball first appeared on the website Facebook shortly after the meme was first created. At some point between when it was made It quickly On 11 November 2009 (Polish Independence Day), the group was converted into a page. The page quickly became the largest POLANDBALL outlet on the website.

This Polandball community on Facebook (arguably the only one on the website) began to manifest in its comments section. The jokes of Polandball became very easy to catch from its main page because there was direct communication with its origins on Krautchan. All typical features of Polandball were usually followed, and when they weren't, it was very easy to determine it was wrong.

Growth

The community began to expand and make its own Facebook pages on December 15, 2012. The first page created was titled "BRAZILBALL" and was based on frequent Polandball character Brazilball. It still exists and remains highly popular amongst the Polandball community there. Other pages based on other Polandball characters were created soon afterward, such as TURKEYBALL and Canadaball. The POLANDBALL Facebook page initially ignored this community because it was not rooted and often broke traditional Polandball elements. It may have also spurred the popularity of /r/Polandball. Later on, this lack of roots improved, and the POLANDBALL page began to interact with its newfound community more.

Being Banned

The page "POLANDBALL", being a popular Facebook page and also the basis of a meme with many edgy

Faceblock

jokes are sometimes removed from Facebook by website staff and its own admins for various reasons. The most common reasons are depictions of Nazi swastikas in Polandball images, which is illegal in Germany. This culminated in a particularly long banning of the page on November 15, 2013. The community surrounding the page began to worry that this ban was permanent. The website's Polandball community at large, for the first time, rallied together to "defend Polandball" and protest its censorship. The page later came back and recognized the community at large for the first time. This newfound community caused POLANDBALL's popularity to skyrocket to 120,000 likes from previously only being half of this. It also led to the creation of a unique character seen in the Polandball community, commonly known as "Faceblock".

Present Status

The Polandball community on Facebook is currently the largest identifiable one on the internet, having numerous fans from many different parts of the world. It is often considered the most active community as well, though in recent years this has shrank. It is known for many quickly-identifiable factors that have made it famous and infamous amongst other Polandball communities on the internet. These include unique characters like Faceblock, consistently poor English and a very laissez-faire style of content. It has influenced the popularities of many other communities, such as /r/polandball and Polandball on 9gag. The community's laissez-faire style has triggered both more popularity for the meme and concerns about its general direction.

Community

As with all Facebook communities, the page has a diverse fanbase hailing from all over the world with a wide array of beliefs. This means that whatever the page posts will be "bait" by default and enrage whoever the comic made a jab at. This usually results in the fanbase circle-jerking around the joke and making fun of the "victim" while the "victim" calls Poland all sorts of names. Said "victims" return to the page once the next comic is posted that makes fun of a political or cultural group that they in turn do not like. Rinse and repeat.

Features

Loose rules

Polandball on Facebook has never had any set of rules that unifies it, considering few people can post on actual pages and that the website is designed to create communities in a very capitalistic manner. Therefore, frequenters of Polandball on Facebook are not as concerned about the traditions of Polandball as other communities sometimes are.

Polandball, naturally, is a difficult meme to portray properly and even understand without understanding its origins. The POLANDBALL Facebook page, having been created by a frequenter of Krautchan's /int/ board (where Polandball was started), has been consistently on par with Polandball's overall nature and common features. The remainder of the Facebook Polandball community was born from the Facebook page, thus creating a third link that did not necessarily have any connection with Krautchan. Therefore, dissent from Polandball tradition became very common amongst its loose community, in spite of the POLANDBALL Facebook page's consistency in retaining Polandball's traditional elements.

Facebook rules

Rules on Facebook for what a person can post are designed to create a general sense of good manners amongst its users. This means that the promotion of things such as neo-Nazism and neo-Confederatism are usually discouraged. In Polandball's case, when posting about these things, it is usually in its own satirical way, which is considered by its community to be harmless and certainly not promotional. Regardless, many Polandball images have been removed from Facebook because they depict some of these things.

Images of Hitler, Nazi swastikas, Confederate Naval Jacks, pictures of Hitler, Jewish symbols used in unflattering ways, and other things are the most frequently removed images by Facebook officials.

In response to this, depictions of Nazi Germanyball are sometimes (if not often) changed by their originators. Since the swastika is the most sensitive part of the countryball, people began replacing the swastika with other icons. These icons are usually referential to the censorship in a satirical way. Common representations are pink hearts and silhouettes of guns. The most common icon is definitely a Facebook "f".

Unique characters

Fan characters in the Facebook community began around the same time other Facebook pages were founded. These characters are often the most controversial aspects of the community, considering that they are rarely countries and represent other things such as business

One of the most popular fan characters indigenous to Facebook Polandball is "Faceblock" (sometimes called less direct things, like Facebook). Faceblock is based largely off of Polandball character Reichtangle. It is, respectively, shaped like a box or a rectangular prism, and focuses its time on hurting (based off of "Anschlussing ") other Polandball characters. Its most common target is Polandball. This is based also on the fact that the most commonly-removed Facebook page is POLANDBALL, based off of Polandball.

Facebook admins

Because of the laissez-faire freedoms that Facebook gets, users began to develop blog-like personalities in the Facebook Polandball community. They developed these by tagging themselves on Polandball-related Facebook pages as means of identifying who posted what images (Facebook now has a feature amongst page admins that tells who posted what images, but previously this did not exist and remains impossible to see by fans).

Facebook admins hold influence in directing Polandball on Facebook by telling users what to do and how to draw. They also technically control the flow of content amongst the community since they have access to the pages. Because of this, they draw controversy and criticism from people both inside and outside their communities.

Several particularly successful Facebook page admins, such as Reagan and AP, are looked to by frequenters of Polandball on the website as pinnacles of the community at large, and as such help control the social parts of the community as well as Polandball content itself.

Many Facebook page admins in the Polandball community have their own Facebook pages with which they blog from. The most popular of these is Earl of Grey, who has turned his page into a character based off of the admin's various and thinly-valued opinions on the world.