A Non-Profit Newspaper Published a Column Criticizing Facebook. Then Meta Blocked All of Its Posts. Facebook's communications chief said that the posts were removed because of "a mistaken security issue."
By Sherin Shibu
Key Takeaways
- The Kansas Reflector published an opinion piece titled: "When Facebook fails, local media matters even more for our planet's future."
- Meta blocked links to the piece, and other reporting from The Reflector, for about a day.
Meta blocked all posts from The Kansas Reflector on Thursday after the nonprofit newspaper called out Facebook, which Meta owns, and other forms of social media in an article.
The article, titled "When Facebook fails, local media matters even more for our planet's future," directly calls out Meta and Facebook for suppressing posts related to climate change and highlights the role of local media in stepping up to the plate.
"We are getting along OK without the promotional help of Facebook, but it does seem problematic that a behemoth such as Meta can dictate the terms of our communications," documentary producer Dave Kendall wrote in the opinion piece.
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According to a Friday article from The Reflector, Facebook stopped the publication from sharing Kendall's opinion piece on Thursday and then removed all links to the outlet on its platform.
Andy Stone, communications director at Meta, apologized for the mistake on Thursday and said that the error "had nothing to do with the Reflector's recent criticism of Meta." He stated that the mistake had been corrected.
On Friday, Facebook had brought back all the posts that linked to the Kansas Reflector's stories — except for anything that linked to Kendall's article, which was still down for a period of time.
By Friday night, the issue had been completely resolved and users were able to link to and view Kendall's article.
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Independent journalist Marisa Kabas reposted the Kansas Reflector's column on Friday "in an attempt to sidestep Meta's censorship" and said that the damage had already been done: the articles had already been flagged as malicious.
"That's a big problem because that undermines our trust," Kabas told CNN Business.
