ATLANTA -- 11Alive News carried a story on the parody City of Atlanta Facebook page in October 2016, before any other news outlet.
In our digital story, we posted a link to the page -- but if you click on that link today, you will find that it no longer exists.
The address now redirects to the official City of Atlanta's Facebook page.
According to a city of Atlanta spokesman, “Facebook alone is responsible for Facebook’s decision to delete the ‘City of Atlanta Government’ parody page, presumably based on content it found objectionable or not up to its standards.”
Comedian Ben Palmer originally created the parody page. He now lives in Los Angeles and spoke with 11Alive's Joe Henke via Facetime on Saturday afternoon.
Using the City of Atlanta's official seal, his page's logo looked legitimate -- if you ignored the phoenix's top hat and monocle.
In 2016, he told 11Alive he made the page to make his friends laugh.
"Somewhere along the way, other people just started following the page and it grew really fast," Palmer said.
After leaving Atlanta to pursue stand-up comedy in Los Angeles, Palmer kept writing jokes for his Atlanta page.
"Just kept making more posts and just kind of doing my research on Atlanta and what is going on in the news there and then talking to people from home and looking for jokes, stories and just running it that way," Palmer said.
Posts included pokes at the infamously nicknamed, now-since-demolished 'Murder Kroger' on Ponce de Leon Avenue, with Palmer writing, "If you get murdered outside of Publix, you will be fined $100 for not being murdered outside of Kroger."
Recently though, a post appeared for an event hosted by the page and scheduled for Sunday, August 5, titled "The Stone Mountain Implosion."
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"There was no plans to blow up the giant rock, and that would be a pretty difficult task to accomplish," he said.
But the event gained traction on Facebook.
Fact-checking site Snopes.com researched it before labeling the implosion as false. The event picture showed the mountain's massive carving of Confederate leaders General Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis.
Palmer saved this comment left on the event from a man named Jeff:
"I have reported this event to Facebook as terrorism. That's what it is."
"That was an actual person," Palmer said. "There was tons of comments in the event, and that was one of them."
Palmer says Facebook didn't contact him about the page's removal but he believes the Stone Mountain event killed it.
"I feel like it didn't get taken down because it was actually anything that deserved to be taken down," Palmer said. "I feel like just enough people marked it as terrorism or reported it as unsafe and then the Facebook machine or the AI or whatever they use just took it down without doing any research into it.
Palmer, though, wants the page's 150,000-plus followers to know it will be back.
"It imploded. Stone Mountain didn't implode, the Facebook page imploded, okay. So everyone, calm down, we are going to rebuild and we will have a new 'City of Atlanta' page once again," he said.
