Camestros Felapton

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Facebook is blocking criticism of Facebook (updated)

Update: Facebook has backed down in embarrassment and has removed the blocks

I read this article this morning about some very disturbing behaviour from Meta aka the parent company of Facebook.

“Something strange started happening Thursday morning: Facebook users who’d at some point in the past posted a link to a story from the Kansas Reflector received notifications that their posts had violated community standards on cybersecurity. “It looks like you tried to gather sensitive information, or shared malicious software,” the alert said. “

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/facebook-kansas-reflector-links-banned

The Kansas Reflector is a not for profit news site that had recently published this article that was critical of the impact of Facebook on news reporting and the role local news outlets can play, in particular on issues like climate change:

“Knowing that many people are distraught by the challenges we’re facing, we certainly don’t want to exacerbate the climate anxiety and depression that already exists. The bishop’s response, along with those of others who have now seen the show, indicates we are on track in our effort to inform and educate without unduly magnifying a sense of hopelessness. Collaborating with others who share our concerns, we have set up a number of public screenings in addition to broadcasts on public television.

Imagine my surprise when I attempted to “boost” a post on Meta’s Facebook to begin our online promotional efforts — and the company summarily rejected it.”

https://kansasreflector.com/2024/04/04/when-facebook-fails-local-media-matters-even-more-for-our-planets-future/?utm_source=www.thehandbasket.co&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=a-local-news-site-was-critical-of-facebook-then-meta-banned-all-their-links

After publishing that story, Facebook began blocking/removing posts with links to the Kansas Reflector in general.

I tried that myself:

And sure enough, Facebook won’t let me post that:

camestrosfelapton

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16 responses to “Facebook is blocking criticism of Facebook (updated)”

  1. Good grief.

    But it’s just another problem of allowing conglomerates to control everything. Unfortunately, they can do just that — they don’t have to allow any speech they don’t want to. It’s a shame they chose to die on this cliff, though, and not the budding fascism.

    Liked by 4 people

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  4. Backing down in embarrassment is a behavior that I’ve decided to think moderately well of, since recently, we’ve seen an alternative behavior “refusing to be embarrassed by manifestly embarrassing actions” and that’s way more annoying. Not that I’m going to get a Facebook account.

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    • Yes, I too was mildly-surprised-and-pleased that they backed down. They’re still a bit capable of being embarrassed and reversing course. Unlike waves at too many other places.

      Liked by 2 people

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  5. Facebook never really promised anyone free speech. But they’re having a lot of battles over international news and disinformation, so since people yelled about this one, they tried the technical difficulties excuse and backed away.

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  6. As long as Facebook refuses to let me link to any news source at all just because I live in Canada, and seems to fail to post any alt text I attempt to link to any picture, I still won’t trust them. Both of these are important and basic access issues.

    I use them, because I know too many people and some social groups, which are most easily followed there, but it’s always and only because of the users and never an appreciation of the place.

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  7. Over on Bluesky, someone who has some experience with spammers posted an analysis that exonerates Meta of deliberate censorship of criticism:

    https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3kpkwdw5wv62j

    1. Something in the article mistakenly tripped Meta’s automated spam/malware/phishing detection systems. Those systems block massive amounts of garbage daily: tens of thousands of links if not more. There is A LOT of this garbage on the internet.

    (skipping a few steps)

    4. The more people tried to repost the content and reshare it, the more it looked to the detectors exactly like the behavior of garbage posters trying to evade the block on the posting of their garbage, because that’s exactly what they do when their garbage gets blocked.

    (skip some more)

    The behavior of “people trying to repost this story that’s being unjustly censored” is, legitimately, indistinguishable from “malicious actors trying to evade detection of blocks on their malicious content”, and the more the story grows, the more it looks like that.

    And, when she looked at the site itself:

    WordPress 6.3 with a ton of outdated plugins. Yeah, that explains it: I bet if someone good with WordPress forensics looked, they’d find all kinds of compromise indicators.

    For whatever that might be worth.

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      • Yeah, reading that makes me nod in agreement. It seems exactly what would happen, because a groundswell of people posting it is indistinguishable from a bot network. So I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

        Liked by 1 person

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    • I saw that but there are a few things that make me dubious. The pattern of what did and didn’t get blocked shifted. The Wayback Machine link got blocked but the Archive.is link did not. My actual post (which had the same links in it) didn’t get blocked. An algorithm just running through websites and blocking any with links to the presumed malicious site should have picked those.

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