In order to verify the idea that there was a security breach on the Reflector’s domain, Marisa Kabas, a journalist from Brooklyn, requested permission to repost the article on her own website.
As Kabas shared her own link to the column on Threads, Meta promptly removed it due to concerns over its potentially harmful nature. Then, according to Kabas, Meta destroyed everything her website had ever posted on its platforms, a block that lasted for at least two hours.
When CNN asked Meta for more details regarding the security concern, Meta didn’t reply. In a letter published on Friday, Sherman Smith, the chief editor of the Kansas Reflector, stated that Facebook representative Andy Stone “wouldn’t elaborate on how the mistake happened and said there would be no further explanation.”
“What was the mistake in security? We’re not sure,” Kabas stated in her account of events. “What led to the blocking of the links? We’re not sure. “Our trust has been undermined at a time when people need little reason to distrust the news,” even though all of the links have been fixed.
The Multiverse
The scandal serves to highlight one of the more dangerous aspects of our Extremely Online Era—the concentration of power in social media—which is sometimes ignored in a jumble of dry regulatory speak.
The fact that Meta made its first public remark on X, the website that was formerly known as Twitter, on Thursday night is one of the biggest ironies. Of course, Kabas and the Reflector team had to shift their grievances to one of the few open spaces that Meta did not run, which left mostly X and its smaller competitor, Bluesky.
Opinion editor Clay Wirestone of the Reflector commented, “Anyone involved this past week now understands that putting our civic conversation into the hands of a single for-profit business generates profound risks for society as a whole.”
Naturally, individuals from all political persuasions frequently accuse Meta of content censorship; nevertheless, they frequently fail to realize that Meta is a company and not the Free Speech Police. The distinction lies in the fact that Meta admitted its error and eventually corrected it, albeit in a confusingly non-transparent manner that raised many problems for content authors.
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