By Allison Morrow | CNN
Meta blocked a critical newspaper article for hours on Facebook and its other social sites, sparking a backlash that intensified after the company appeared to block links to the website of an independent journalist who had republished the article.
The controversy began Thursday morning when users noticed that all links to the nonprofit newspaper Kansas Reflector had been flagged as a cybersecurity threat and their posts had been removed. About seven hours later, the newspaper reported that most of its links had been restored, except for one: a section that criticized Facebook and accused it of removing posts related to climate change.
Meta apologized to Reflector and its readers Thursday for what the company’s communications chief, Andy Stone, called “an error that has nothing to do with Reflector’s recent criticism of Meta.”
But on Friday, users who tried to share the column on Facebook, Instagram or Threads, received a warning that it was violating community guidelines. This seemed suspicious to Marisa Kabas, an independent journalist in New York, who asked the Reflector for permission to publish the text of the column on her own website, Handbasket.
“I thought it would be an interesting experience,” Kabas told CNN on Friday. Around 1 p.m. ET, she posted the article on her own site, “in an effort to circumvent Meta’s censorship,” she wrote in a preface to the column.
She then shared her message on Threads. “A few minutes later, I received an alert that it had been flagged and removed for malicious content,” Kabas told CNN.
Kabas’ post was banned from all Meta platforms for several hours on Friday. And for about two hours, she says, all links to her site were blocked. Her bonds were all restored by late Friday afternoon, she said.
In a post Friday on Threads, Stone said the blocked links were “due to a security error” that also mistakenly blocked links to The Handbasket and the nonprofit news aggregation site News From The States.
“The poorly implemented blockades have now been lifted,” he wrote. “This is undoubtedly frustrating and we sincerely apologize to everyone who was affected.”
Stone did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for details on the security issue.
“This looks like a bug with our sharing scraper or maybe the domain is mistakenly taken as a security measure,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a post Friday. “We certainly don’t block links to articles critical of us… I will, however, speak to the team now and investigate the bug so we can fix it as soon as possible.”
Kansas Reflector editor Sherman Smith wrote Friday that Stone “did not want to explain how the error occurred and said there would be no other explanation.”
Kabas said the damage was already done as the articles had already been flagged as malicious. “It’s a big problem because it undermines our confidence,” she said.
California Daily Newspapers
