Meta faces charges Suppressing News Organization and Independent Journalist
Meta has been accused of blocking a non-profit newspaper and an independent journalist who spoke out against the company.
A Meta representative apologized on Friday for a mistake that blocked links with content critical of Meta.
This error caused trouble, as it affected a newspaper’s negative report about Meta on Facebook and other social platforms.
The problem started on Thursday morning. Then, people saw that every link to the Kansas Reflector, a non-profit newspaper, was flagged as harmful, and the posts were removed. Around seven hours later, most of the links were back, except one. It was a column that had slammed Facebook and claimed that it was suppressing climate change posts. Meta said sorry to the Kansas Reflector and its readers on Thursday.
Andy Stone, the top communications person at Meta, said it was a mistake that had nothing to do with the newspaper’s recent negative words about Meta. Then on Friday, if you tried to share the column on Facebook, Instagram, or Threads, it would tell you that it goes against community rules. This got Marisa Kabas’s attention. She’s an independent journalist in New York. She got permission from the Kansas Reflector to post the column’s text on her website, the Handbasket.
“This would be a good experiment,” Kabas told CNN on Friday. She posted the story on her site around 1 pm ET to get around Meta’s blocking. Then, a few minutes later, she got a message that her post was flagged and taken down because it was harmful. Her post was blocked from all Meta platforms for a few hours on Friday. All her links were also blocked for about two hours. But they were all back by late Friday afternoon.
On Friday, Stone said that the blocked links were a mistake. He said this blocked links to the Handbasket and the non-profit news site News From The States by accident. “We’ve stopped blocking the links that were blocked by accident,” he wrote. “We know this is frustrating, and we really are sorry to the people who felt the effects.” Stone did not reply right away to a request from CNN for more details about the security problem.
“It seems like a glitch with our sharing tool caused this or accidentally made this trigger a safety measure,” said Adam Mosseri, who is in charge of Instagram, in a post on Friday. “But we do not block links to articles that criticize us…I’ll talk to the team now to find the bug and fix it as soon as possible.” On Friday, Sherman Smith, who is in charge of the Kansas Reflector, wrote that Stone “did not explain the mistake and said he would not say anything else about it.
” Kabas said that the problem was already done by the time the articles were tagged as harmful. “That’s a big problem. It takes away our trust,” she said.