Zimbabwe’s popular H-Metro tabloid newspaper H-Metro has two Facebook Pages. The bad news (for H-Metro) is that the most popular one, and the most recently updated one at that, is the fake one. The fake H-Metro Facebook Page has 11,379 likes, while the real one has just 3,854 likes.

HMetro posted an update on its website recently alerting users an imposter page was pretending to be the real H-Metro:

To all our readers and Facebook fans, please be advised that there is a FAKE H-Metro Facebook Page doing rounds on the internet imitating the REAL H-Metro page.

Please be advised that we do not have individuals administering another page on our behalf neither do we have an input on it.
This FAKE page does not carry the views and/or opinions of H-Metro.
Please, be warned that if people’s rights are violated in anyway H-Metro will not be held accountable.
To visit the official Facebook Page login into www.facebook.com/HMetrozim

Here’s the fake one facebook.com/pages/H-Metro-Real-Life-Real-Drama/259352957428224

The most likely situation here is that the official H-Metro came to the party a little late. They have bureaucratic old media red tape to deal with before they take any radical steps like having some social media presence. And when consensus was finally reached at Zimpapers, someone had already seized the opportunity to use the controversial crowd pulling brand. And use it they did!

It’s possible for HMetro to have the fake one pulled down if they contact Facebook of course but they shouldn’t expect the process to be easy. An easier route would be trying to convince the administrators of the fake page to hand it over. Or better still, they could outsource the social media side of the tabloid to them; these imposters clearly have a better understanding of social media. Maybe the those Twitter and YouTube icons on the H-Metro website could become more than just place holders.

That aside, the HMetro website has to be one of the most unstable websites out there. It’s down so often we almost don’t see the need to check when someone complains about it being down. Take this weekend for example, the website was down the whole weekend with the now usual “This site has been suspended” message. The site was restored this morning.

The HMetro website itself recently went through a design makeover.