It’s easy to understand why some people want to see the massive social media company broken up, or at the very least subject to stricter regulations, given that Meta platforms have up to 4 billion monthly active users.
Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp are all owned by a single trillion-dollar corporation. As demonstrated by a recent censorship fight with Meta, this concentration of digital ownership can have negative effects in the real world.
Following the barring of links by an independent journalist and a nonprofit newspaper that released a report criticizing Facebook and charging it with stifling posts about climate change, Meta issued an apology last week. Meta blamed an unidentified “security issue” and denied that it was restricting any information.
On Thursday, all 6,000 stories, or every link the Kansas Reflector has ever shared on Facebook, vanished from the social media site. A warning about the site’s potential security risk was displayed to anyone attempting to publish a Reflector link for a period of seven hours.
The Reflector staff was in the dark for seven hours as to why Meta, a tech giant that no major publisher can ignore due to its control over the most popular social media platforms worldwide, had destroyed years’ worth of digital work and damaged the reputation of the local paper by falsely informing its readership that some of its links might be malicious.
Almost all of the Reflector’s links were back up by the end of the day, with the exception of one opinion piece that questioned Facebook’s guidelines on sponsored promotions.
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