A local news site was critical of Facebook–then Meta banned all their links | Hacker News Reader

A local news site was critical of Facebook–then Meta banned all their links

thehandbasket.co

55 pointsrideontime14 comments

Meta communications director Andy Stone has claimed:

> Due to a security error, links to the @KansasReflector were blocked for a period of time. The same security mistake prompted the blocking of links to @statesnewsroom and The Handbasket/@marisakabas2

> The incorrectly applied blocks have now been lifted from all three domains, but it does take time for our system to fully repopulate all the links.

> This is undoubtedly frustrating and we sincerely apologize to all who have been impacted. We will continue to monitor the situation.

(https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1776366040844296268)

Would be interesting to see a dive into what the "security error" was, especially since from what others are saying it blocked anything hosting the Meta-critical article text as opposed to a specific site. Possibly tripped some account phishing detector (due to mentions of Facebook combined with phrases like "red alert")?

Trying to post this article to Facebook, it was rejected with the error "Posts that look like spam according to our Community Guidelines are blocked on Facebook and can't be edited."

Replies to Meta's PR hack Andy Stone show the same thing: https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1776006461929238780

Is there still somewhere to see what you're referring to which doesn't involve creating a Twitter account?

Here's a screenshot of his latest claims: https://i.imgur.com/VPkPkgd.png

And here's his first, quieter explanation, along with a couple of the replies proving him wrong: https://i.imgur.com/bUAwRuh.png

I no longer work at Meta, but it's most likely 1) the website got hacked and serves malware or 2) false positive. There's plenty of websites that are critical of Facebook. No one at Meta has 4 billion users - no employee is concerned about a tiny local newspaper and would purposely censor them.

The most likely reason is that there are a lot of phishing and spam websites that pretend to be Facebook, so the spam filter catches the keyword "Facebook".

Except links to the site still go through, but links to the specific article are blocked

https://bsky.app/profile/cmhenry.bsky.social/post/3kpftv6thu...

Posting the raw text of the article in question in a GitHub gist and linking to the gist is also banned

when facebook testified to congress about cambridge analytica they named other sites which had been shadow-banned/outright-banned for various reasons

Someone there is doing bans for political or grudge reasons beyond spam.

1 very clearly did not happen, and 2 is awfully convenient for facebook.

Among news sites that would ever run stories about Facebook, the share that have run critical news stories about Facebook has to be close to 100%.

> “The good news is Facebook can't have any say in what we write, when we write it, or how we write it,” Smith said, “And they have increasingly little impact on who actually sees our stories. So we're able to get stories in front of people through, not just other social media platforms and through our website, but also through our newsletter. And so I just don't think that Facebook can effectively silence a news organization, and certainly doesn't have the same kind of impact that it would have had two years ago or 10 years ago.”

I think it's unlikely they even noticed in the first place, but let's grant the implication that Facebook did this as a reprisal. It's petty, but also completely within their right, and sort of a natural reaction.

I'm glad they have (or believe they have) other ways of getting news out to people beyond just social media. The lesson to learn, imho, is that it was a bad idea for the news industry to completely hitch its wagon to social media in the first place. Maybe it seemed necessary at the time, but it was a bad idea. It wasn't so much a risk of being at the mercy of those platforms, but a fait accompli, and meanwhile their other audience-building skills atrophied. So, while the website and newsletter are probably good to keep up, I would not be so smug about having other social media platforms to turn to, as they are not really the robust solutions they may seem to be.

And I'm not a Kansas Reflector reader, but my guess is Facebook actually did influence what, how, and when they wrote articles, assuming they are anything like literally every other news outlet in the entire world.

> It's petty, but also completely within their right

Not necessarily. The right to refuse business usually does not apply to monopolies. A good historical example is AT&T and its telephony service.

It's entirely feasible that earlier or later Facebook and similar companies will finally be recognized as monopolies and treated as such.

I certainty hope so.

But I hope even more that "Meta" will be broken up into a lot of pieces.

[dupe]

Some more discussion on the original Kansas Reflector post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39936960

Reply on news.ycombinator.com