No it's not. In the non-free world text itself is censored. Nobody prevents you from sending News article links via Whatsapp, who cares. But people constructing SEO-optimized fakenews links is really bad and IMHO there is no way to prevent that without putting in the work that actual journalists and publishers do. People can still visit the news sites (in the "free world") directly. In fact maybe this would stop the bankruptcy of the news outlets that's been going on since more than a decade

What I'm saying is, FB is amazingly bad at handling news content. Everything they do in this directions backfires badly, becoming a cesspool of misinformation leading to riots etc. I mean if people link content anyway, why don't people just visit it directly?

I mean with the inception of Google News, people thought News has little value because it is so repetitive and many news outlets went bankrupt leading to less and less reflected news to what we have now. I think if people would go for (Online) Newspaper subscriptions instead of just clicking on the most flashy FB post, this would surely make the world a better place and would be quite contrary to China where Newspapers are censored