Ville de Bitche is a town situated in northwestern France with a rich military history, pastoral landscape and Facebook insists it must change its name or having its page deleted.

It is not the first time that the French town has fallen foul of US censors. In 2019 the town had its page banned.

Now the city's communication manager, Valêrie Degouy, contacted Facebook on March 19 to explain the situation and ask the company to reverse its decision — for the second time.

As she awaited Facebook's response — which apologised and reinstated the page Tuesday — Degouy set up a new page for her town, under the name of Marie 57230, her city's postal code.

While this sort of thing is rather amusing,  for the towns located around Bitche, local Facebook pages serve as the main form of communication now that local papers have been shut down. Closing the Facebook page creates a local news blackout.

When Rohrbach-les Bitche — a nearby town in the region — heard about the deletion, it quickly rid "ls-Bitche" from its Facebook page name to avoid a similar fate.

But Facebook is not only filling the local news void — it is tied to local papers' disappearance. "Social and digital media are a contributing factor in thinking about the declines of the presence of local newsrooms, as well as what that coverage looks like for the local newsrooms that remain", Scacco says.

Facebook is moving advertising dollars away from local newspapers and even driving the content local newspapers to create. Local news coverage often panders to Facebook's algorithms when creating content and headlines, notes Ashley Muddiman, a communications professor at the University of Kansas.