We began back in 2014 as a group of friends who had met online in a forum a few years earlier. We migrated towards social media as that took off - building a strong community over the years on Facebook. Our first walks in 2014 would not have been as successful if we had not made great use of Facebook, although we did begin by organising walks through a website forum, not Facebook.
Roll on to today and the social media environment is radically different. We left Twitter when it became a place where as a charity, we didn’t feel comfortable staying. Two years ago we opened an account on Bluesky, a different kind of social media platform. Much smaller in scale than Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, it is friendly. We have been steadily building a Schnauzerfest community there ever since.
We are now faced with some big challenges in the social media environment of 2026 and AI.
Meta (Instagram and Facebook platforms) has for some time been restricting how our account is discovered by people, among those who already follow us, and those yet to find us. We are not alone, charities are all similarly affected, even those with paid social media professionals who spend their careers working on these problems.
As a small, volunteer run charity, we do not have the resources to immerse ourselves full-time in this new and difficult environment. We have to work things out as we go. And we were doing ok until recently, your support is unwavering and always there and we completely appreciate everything you give to ensure that we can deliver support to the dogs. We felt we were managing.
But, changes which are coming in from meta are overwhelming in scope.
First, public pages like ours will be charged monthly subscriptions just to continue as before. For example to use links to our website for more information, links to rescues caring for the dogs we are helping, we use many links every month and to continue that, we are faced with some high charges.
We have not agreed to do this.
In addition, when the charges come in, if we do not pay, our work will not reach beyond our existing meta followers, and there will be other restrictions. It all leads us to question how we stay on meta platforms.
And there is more. In addition to the charges, new terms of service are soon due to come in worldwide. Pages which continue to use meta platforms will be consenting to AI bots (aka web crawlers) scraping platforms and websites linked to them. This is a major concern for us and we are undertaking a rapid review of everything we are doing on social media.
The urgent need for this was brought home to us over the weekend.
A beautiful photograph which we shared (with permission of the family to do so) of a supporter with his dog, was subjected to AI theft and a fake AI video was created using the photograph and words from our Facebook page. The theft and AI fake video was a big enough shock, but even worse, and more upsetting, the gentleman’s family sent it to us with a tribute and donation from his funeral. We were, and remain, deeply upset by the incident and have done everything we can to have it taken down by meta. As yet, we have received no replies to our appeals.
In summary, we are facing a challenge unlike any we have had to manage. We are resilient and determined and will not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed. But, for us to continue doing the work we do, we will need your active support like never before.
How you can help
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Send our newsletters onto friends and family who might be interested in our work
Join our Bluesky community here and introduce yourself so we can help connect supporters
If you use Substack, Janetta has an account here and will update it regularly with our news
Please tell others what we are facing and ask them to support by doing the same
We developed as a grassroots community which became a registered charity. We are the same today, in the face of these global, enormous challenges, we know that you will do all you can to help Schnauzerfest evolve and together we will move through these forces positively and we will not be daunted. (Or at least, not for long!).
