The company suffered even more backlash hours after Meta appeared to obstruct links to the website of an independent journalist who had reposted the newspaper’s critical piece. The newspaper’s critical piece had been blocked by Meta on Facebook and other social media sites.
Users realized that all links to the nonprofit Kansas Reflector newspaper had been marked as cybersecurity threats and that their postings had been removed on Thursday morning, which sparked the debate. After almost seven hours, the newspaper reported that the majority of its connections had been fixed, with the exception of one—a column that had denounced Facebook and charged it with stifling posts about climate change.
Andy Stone, the business’s head of communications, issued an apology on behalf of Meta to the Reflector and its readers on Thursday, claiming that the mistake was unrelated to the Reflector’s previous criticism of the company.
However, on Friday, anybody who tried to post the essay on Threads, Facebook, or Instagram was alerted that it didn’t comply with community norms.
Marisa Kabas, an independent journalist in New York, found it strange and obtained permission from the Reflector to post the column’s text on her own website, the Handbasket.
“I believed it would be an interesting test,” Kabas stated to CNN on Friday. She posted the item on her own website at 1:00 PM Eastern Time, stating in the column’s introduction that it was an attempt to “sidestep Meta’s censorship.”
She then shared her Threads post. Kabas told CNN, “A few minutes later, I received an alert that it had been flagged and removed for malicious content.”
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