Facebook’s content-moderation calls often leave people struggling to figure out what’s off limits, but for most of Thursday a Kansas newsroom had no trouble discerning what Meta’s flagship social network found unacceptable: the entirety of its work.”This morning, sometime between 8:20 and 8:50 a.m. Thursday, Facebook removed all posts linking to Kansas Reflector’s website,” a post on that Topeka-based site explained Thursday afternoon. “This move not only affected Kansas Reflector’s Facebook page, where we link to nearly every story we publish, but the pages of everyone who has ever shared a story from us.”The notifications Facebook sent to readers after removing their posts sharing Reflector stories falsely suggested violations of its cybersecurity policies: “It looks like you tried to gather sensitive information, or shared malicious software,” read one such note as shared by a reader as a screenshot posted on Bluesky. The Thursday story by Reflector Editor-in-Chief Sherman Smith and Opinion Editor Clay Wirestone said this bulk deletion happened hours after the site published an opinion piece from filmmaker Dave Kendall headlined “When Facebook fails, local media matters even more for our planet’s future.”Kendall’s piece recounted how Facebook rejected his attempt to pay to boost a post about his climate-change documentary Hot Times in the Heartland because it “doesn’t comply with our Ads about Social Issues, Elections or Politics policy.” That policy document outlines “authenticity and legitimacy” requirements for those ads but does not list banned topics. Wrote Kendall: “Apparently, Meta deems climate change too controversial for discussion on their platforms.”Smith and Wirestone wrote that after they twice saw Facebook refuse their own attempts to post a link to Kendall’s piece, they “instead simply linked to our website with advice to find the story there.” That didn’t work either: “Within the next half-hour, all posts linking to our site were gone.”Thursday afternoon, my own attempt to share a link to the editors’ post on Facebook from my personal account was rejected with a spam-suspected error. I tried Threads next and received one of the least informative error messages I’ve ever seen—“Link not allowed”—but then succeeded in sharing a screengrab of that error.In an email Thursday night, Smith said the Reflector’s Threads and Instagram accounts had not escaped this ban, leaving its X and TikTok accounts as its only operational social-media outposts. “It appeared that all of the links to our site on Threads disappeared at the same time as those on Facebook,” he wrote. “Our Instagram account also was down for a while because we had a link to our website in our profile description.”Meta did not answer an email sent Thursday afternoon to its press office, although spokesman Andy Stone posted a vague reply Thursday evening to the Reflector’s tweet about the ban: “This was an error that had nothing to do with the Reflector’s recent criticism of Meta. It has since been reversed and we apologize to the Reflector and its readers for the mistake,” he wrote.Content moderation can go wrong in numerous ways, especially when automated, but Stone did not answer replies asking about the nature of this error. On Friday morning, the Reflector was back in action; Meta restored almost all of the removed posts—but not Kendall’s essay.
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Later this afternoon, journalist Marisa Kabas (who had originally highlighted Facebook’s blocking of the Reflector in a Thursday post on her newsletter The Handbasket) posted on Bluesky that Threads blocked her from sharing a link to a copy of Kendall’s piece that she’d posted to her newsletter with the Reflector’s permission. I had no better luck trying to post a link to either the original story or Kabas’ copy from my own Facebook account. The error message served up to me each time: “Posts that look like spam according to our Community Guidelines are blocked on Facebook and can’t be edited.”Smith then confirmed in an email that Meta was still blocking its attempts to link to Kendall’s story, adding that Facebook had also removed all links to Kabas’ newsletter and to a news-aggregation site run by the Reflector’s corporate parent, States Newsroom. My own try at sharing a link to The Handbasket got the same accusation of spammy behavior, even though I’d set that Facebook post to be visible only to myself. The Reflector is one of 39 state-specific news sites funded by States, a nonprofit organization set up to help fill the gap in local news coverage. Last summer, the Reflector’s coverage of a police raid on a local newspaper in Marion, Kansas, drew widespread attention over the abuse of government authority it documented.Meta, however, has appreciated news less and less in recent years. It began dialing back the political and current-events content in Facebook users’ news feed in 2021, then spent much of the next three years shutting down various initiatives it had launched to boost journalism before announcing in February that it would remove the largely ignored News tab from Facebook and would “not offer new Facebook products specifically for news publishers in the future.” In his Thursday night message, Smith sounded distinctly unamused by Facebook’s treatment of the Reflector’s work and of journalism in general. “Facebook doesn’t get a say in what we write, how we write it, or when we write it,” he wrote. “Facebook’s apparent decisions to shield users from fact-based information makes it increasingly less valuable to us and our readers.”
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