Residents of Gotland bemused by a Facebook glitch that places them just north of Oslo, and local businesses worry it might affect the tourist trade

Facebook has been accused of a lot of things, from riding roughshod over people’s privacy to prudishly censoring the most innocuous of photographs.

But it’s never gone so far as to annex an entire island of 50,000 people and dump it in another country.

A couple of weeks ago, the residents of the sleepy island of Gotland in the Baltic sea off Sweden, started to notice that many of their Facebook entries were listing them as living in Norway, not Sweden.

Before long they realised that, as far as Facebook was concerned, their entire island was in Norway. Search for Gotland on Facebook and the map takes you to a point just north of Oslo on the river Glåma.

Facebook map showing the position of Gotland incorrectly. Photograph: Facebook

“It’s ridiculous,” said Ulrica Fransson Ingelmark, editor of the Gotlands Allehanda newspaper, which first reported the bug.

“It’s been weeks since companies and private persons got a new address in Norway, and we talked about it a lot on the island, and nothing changed, and then we wrote about it, and now it’s a viral success, and Facebook still hasn’t changed it.”

According to Julia Bendelin, who works for an advertising agency on the island, the glitch is causing real inconvenience.

“Last weekend I started a Facebook account for my son, and the first thing that happened was ads from Norway for young kids in Norwegian, and I was like: ‘No, we’re in the middle of the Baltic sea, far from Norway.’ We’ve been hi-jacked by Norway.”

“Of course it’s a problem for small businesses,” she added. “We live off tourists and we don’t want them to go to Norway, we want them to come here! We don’t do fjords.”

Digerhuvud nature reserve on Faro island, just north of Gotland – in Sweden. Photograph: Alamy

Mandarva Stenborg, whose public relations company represents Facebook in Sweden, said she was still waiting for a reply from the company, four days after first reporting the problem.

“I reported it internally to Facebook on Thursday and they haven’t said anything more,” she said. “I guess that they have escalated it internally, but I don’t have any more information on whether it is a mistake or a bug or anything like that.”

For Bendelin, this isn’t good enough. “Don’t investigate it, change it,” she said. “Give us back our island!”