We were cancelled
After years of being an affiliate, we had a difficult decision to make and it cost us YEARS of posts and content that we lost, even for the years we paid our affiliate fees. All gone one morning when I woke up.
Below is the original email I sent out on November 12th.
“Our Instagram account for Elevate YYC (under the handle crossfit_elevate) was purposely suspended by Cr*ssFit Headquarters without warning. Did you know hashtags are trademarked? It’s less common in Canada but it’s a thing ( I should’ve known as a business owner, but I didn't, and that’s on me!).
The Full Story
After making the very difficult decision to un-affiliate due to the increased cost and the lack of transparency of the 2024 Cr*ssFit games incident, we made updates to our website, business name, email addresses, and program names. We received an email on Friday November 7th that our account had been suspended by Instagram for copyright infringement. What followed was an email from a lawyer at Cr*ssFit HQ that they reported our account due to the use of #cr*ssfit in our posts since being unaffiliated. Rather than allowing us to remedy it, they had all our content removed which included posts attached to our @elevate.yyc page since it was collaborated between both accounts. This of course is on me for not knowing or doing the proper research, which I take full responsibility for.
Going Forward
We are still trying to get our original account back but it could take months, if at all. We will move forward solely using our @elevate.yyc account but what this means is that years of content creation (even before we were unaffiliated), posts about our competitions, and all our followers are gone. If you’ve tried to build yourself or your business on social media, you know how absolutely devastating this is for us as a small business. We were told that we were acting maliciously and purposefully deceiving people by using #crossfit which if you know us, you know isn’t true. Keeping the community alive while CrossFit affiliates seem to be dropping like flies in our city was our only intention.
How to Help
Please give our new account a follow and show us some love while we re-build @elevate.yyc
If you have stories, posts, or other content from our competitions or otherwise, please share them and tag us so we can build up our highlight reels again
Tell your friends about us :)
Thank you to everyone for all the love over the years. We’re here for the Community and that’s always been our main ‘Why’.”
I’ve obviously come to terms with this and the organization said they might give it back to me if I played ball, which included doing all the things I listed above, which I did, to which they still said too bad so now we’re rebuilding. Thank you to everyone for being a part of this journey!