Important Facebook Update

To our followers and community supporters on Facebook,

This post is in response to the ongoing issues we have been facing with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and how those issues have unfortunately been impacting all of you. While we will continue to utilize Facebook and Instagram, we have to make some changes to how this page operates, so please read this message carefully.

First and foremost, please know that Owen and I are eternally grateful for the endless support that you all have shown us on this platform. Facebook is our largest follower base, and West Michigan Weather would not be what it is today without all of you. From the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU!

For those of you who are unaware, our page, West Michigan Weather, attained the minimum requirements to become eligible for content monetization in September of 2023. This means that we were eligible to earn money based on the views and interactions we received on the posts we made to this page. This worked great for just 2 months, up until the end of November 2023. Then the funds, which we earned, stopped being transferred over to us, including at this point, funds we earned from those of you who chose to join as Facebook Supporters.

We began opening support tickets. Since December of 2023, we have had more than 3 dozen support tickets open, made numerous phone calls, and have had countless promises of corrective action broken, and still, nearly 14 months later, we have not received any support. The latest ticket we had open was closed out without a solution at 3:00 AM in the morning on February 5th, 2026, with a simple statement: “Please refrain from contacting us again regarding this issue,” and that “our account has been put on hold, has failed the vetting process, and will continue to be on hold. This decision is final.”

As a result of this, we unfortunately have to make some changes going forward.

- We will continue to post our content to Facebook free of charge as we always have.

- However, we are now not able to offer a Community Supporter option here on Facebook, as it is not fair for us to ask you to donate money that we never end up seeing.

- In order to make the West Michigan Weather community possible, we rely on all of you! Storm Chasing and Weather Forecasting are not cheap, and our team of forecasters devotes a significant amount of their personal time creating forecasts and doing live streams, all of which is not paid for! Weather forecasting tools and radar software, fuel, supplies, weather instruments, and all of the promotions we provide to increase awareness come at a cost. Your generosity helps make that more feasible for us.

While we will never require you to support us monetarily to view our most important, timely, and relevant forecasts, we would ask that if you enjoy our forecasts and the work that we do here at West Michigan Weather, you carefully consider doing so by visiting our Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/westmiwx. We are offering 50% off all memberships over $1/month for the first month through February 28th with code WMIWX_1.

Those who choose to support us monetarily get special early access or even exclusive access to some of our most popular and important forecasts, including school closing outlooks, extended range school closing outlooks, snowfall forecasts, severe weather timing graphics, and more. Supporters also get special discount codes on merch, member-only live streams, access to exclusive areas of our Discord server, and more!

Every donation made goes right back into the community. Every penny is used to help us purchase weather forecasting and monitoring software, fuel for storm chases, live streaming services, disaster relief, and more! Not a single cent is made in profit. We dedicate everything right back into the community we serve!

For those who subscribe to us on Facebook already, we will continue to post exclusive content for you there until March 1st, 2026. Please cancel your subscription and resubscribe on patreon prior to that date. Your first month will be free. Please see the Subscriber Only post on our page for the code.