My best guess is that their lists of competitors to keep an eye on got mixed up with other stuff. Or, of course, that they simply don't want to promote competitors on their platform, which would be normal for any non-monopoly.
It would be interesting to do some experiments here: post the same text to see if it gets removed again, and then repost it and remove sentences to see which one triggered the filter.
the largest mastodon instance has 500k users. Facebook has two billion users. If you can post twitter and tiktok and tumblr links on facebook, do you seriously think there's someone sitting at facebook taking names and making lists about a social network that practically nobody even uses
there are competitors a hundred times as large you can link too. My first guess is it probably tripped some NSFW filter because on some mastodon instances there's quite a lot of porn.
Yes, when I worked at a 500-person startup there was an employee who’s sole task was to stay aware of our established competitors and nimbler startups. It was jokingly nicknamed the “office of paranoia.”
That said, I highly doubt FB is using their list of competitors to block posts mentioning them.
Source: I used and helped maintain one of the “don’t federate with these instances” list.