avatarBill Myers

Summary

The website content discusses issues with posting links from the Medium publication "Illumination" on Facebook, which are being rejected without clear explanation, potentially due to being flagged as spam, and outlines a possible workaround.

Abstract

The author of the content encountered difficulties when attempting to share a link to their latest article from the Medium publication "Illumination" on Facebook. The link was rejected, and upon further investigation, the author found that all their previous posts containing Illumination links had disappeared. Testing with other Illumination articles resulted in similar rejections, while links to non-Illumination articles were posted successfully. The author deduced that Facebook had flagged the Illumination URL as spam, possibly due to high posting frequency. Despite reaching out to Facebook, no clear reason for the rejection was provided, and the author suggests a workaround involving altering the URL. The issue appears to have been resolved by September 2020.

Opinions

  • The author is concerned about the unexplained censorship by Facebook, which affects the ability of Illumination's 3,2

Project Management

Facebook Bugs and Censorship

I can’t post any link from the Illumination publication, but older ones go ok. The same can happen with any Medium publication.

Screen Print by author, 2020

I tried to post my latest link in a comment on Facebook about 5 pm today and it was rejected. I was shocked since I posted it in another message yesterday and it worked fine.

I looked at my prior posts and all posts with Illumination links have disappeared. I tried another Illumination article on writing tips and it, too, was rejected. I then tried my first Medium article, not tied to any publication or curated, and it posted without a problem.

I had another person try it — same message.

I couldn’t even send the link to them by message. The link to Illumination, https://medium.com/illumination/, won’t work. This article’s heading picture contains the response.

I sent the link with spaces before and after the slashes and it went through. They got the same message with the link, after taking out the spaces. So, it is not my Facebook ID.

I could not find anything in their “Community Standards” that would cause such a rejection. They say in those standards that they will not explain or respond about anything rejected. I did let them know there was no reason to reject it via their message page. I said that I would “let a 7-year-old read it.”

This tells me that Facebook can censor anything, cite “Community Standards” without explaining what standard applies, and not fix any errors.

Illumination has 3,236 writers. It will be bad if none can post their article links to Facebook. So, these are my questions:

  • Are other Illumination writers having the same problem?
  • Is it a temporary Facebook problem?
  • Do any other Medium publications have the same problem?

I know right now that Medium.com is not being rejected.

September, 2020: The problem seems to be fixed.

August 18, 2020: I’ve since learned that Facebook considers https://medium.com/illumination/ as spam, possibly from being posted too frequently. If so, it can happen to any publication.

Possible workaround:

I will test it.

Category:

Facebook
Censorship
Bugs
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