Meta is accused of censoring a non-profit newspaper and an independent journalist who criticized the company

Meta blocked a newspaper’s critical report about it on Facebook and its other social sites for hours, sparking a backlash that intensified after the company appeared to subsequently block links to the website of an independent journalist who republished the report.

Meta blocked a newspaper’s critical report about it on Facebook and its other social sites for hours, sparking a backlash that intensified after the company appeared to subsequently block links to the website of an independent journalist who republished the report. The controversy began Thursday morning when users noticed that all links to the non-profit newspaper the Kansas Reflector had been flagged as a cybersecurity threat and their posts were removed. About seven hours later, the paper said, most of its links had been restored, save for one — a column that had criticized Facebook and accused it of suppressing posts related to climate change. Meta apologized to the Reflector and its readers on Thursday for what the company’s communications chief, Andy Stone, called a “an error that had nothing to do with the Reflector’s recent criticism of Meta.” But on Friday, users who attempted to share the column on Facebook, Instagram or Threads, were shown a warning that it violated community guidelines. That 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, the Handbasket. “I thought it would be a cool experiment,” Kabas told CNN on Friday. Around 1pm ET, she published the story on her own site, “in an attempt to sidestep Meta’s censorship,” she wrote in a preface to the column. She then shared her post on Threads. “A couple minutes later, I got an alert that it had been flagged and taken down for malicious content,” Kabas told CNN.