Facebook Blocking Links to Kansas Reflector
Earlier this week, Dave Kendall of documentary production company Prairie Hollow and formerly of a Topeka, Kansas PBS station, wrote in the Kansas Reflector an article criticizing Meta. Kendall says he tried to promote posts on Facebook for a screening of “Hot Times in the Heartland” but was prevented from doing so. A presumably automated message said it was not compliant with its political ads policy.
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While this interpretation of a deliberate effort by Facebook to silence critical reporting is kind of understandable, given its poor communication and the lack of adequate followup, it hardly strikes me as realistic. In what world would Meta care so much about tepid criticism published by a small news operation that it would take deliberate manual actions to censor it?
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If some system at Meta erroneously flagged as a threat Kendall’s original attempt to boost a post, it makes sense that related stories and domains would also be flagged.
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Unfortunately, the coverage of this non-story has been wildly disproportionate and misses the actual problems. […] What is true and deeply frustrating is the weak approach of companies like Meta and Google toward customer service. Both have offloaded the administrative work of approving or rejecting ads to largely automated systems, with often vague and unhelpful responses, because they have prioritized scale above quality from their earliest days.
Previously:
Update (2024-04-26): See also: Nick Heer.
