Update, 12 June 2024:
International publishers from the US and Europe have all had Facebook posts unexpectedly flagged as spam and removed, Press Gazette has learned.
The issues newly shared with Press Gazette match those experienced by UK independent local publishers as described in our initial story below. The posts all featured links to typical website articles and the editors involved have been unable to speak to anyone at Meta about it.
The Record-Argus, a small independent newspaper in Pennsylvania in the US, has had several posts with story links in the past few weeks marked as spam and deleted. They have requested a review on each one and not heard back on any, Press Gazette was told.
Sebastian Matyszczak, editor-in-chief of Polish local news website wlkp24.info, told Press Gazette he has seen the issue for several weeks.
He said the posts affected had linked to “normal articles about local life, for example local politics or about a person who is ill and needs money for rehabilitation”.
Jarkovský Josef, who runs Czech-based MMA and fight sports news website Top Fight, said “many” of their posts, all of which linked to the website, have been deleted. Photo and video posts survive, he said.
He added that he has heard nothing from Meta but has successfully appealed some of the post removals.
In Portugal, the director of local news website Noticias Maia, Aldo Maia, got in touch to say they were facing the same issue with several posts and had tried to contact Meta but saw no change.
And in Slovenia, small publisher City Magazine editor-in-chief Jan Macarol told Press Gazette they have had access restricted to several of their pages as a result of posts being marked as spam.
In the UK, Birkenhead News editor David Humphreys estimated that more than 20 posts have been removed since 25 May.
On Monday evening he shared the latest to be removed: a story about “all the candidates standing for Wirral seats in the general election”. The Facebook notification told him: “It looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way” and added: “Your post goes against our Community Standards on spam.”
Humphreys said Birkenhead News, an independent site that launched in 2020, does not “have the resources to battle these deletions” and but they are impactful because a “significant portion” of readers get to the site through links posted on Facebook.
Paul Winspear, who edits the Bishop’s Stortford Independent which is part of Iliffe Media, saw three Facebook posts relating to two election stories removed within 24 hours last week.
Both, he said, were diary-style pieces that showed the local Conservative candidate “in a poor light”.
Winspear has also had one further removal but has struggled to work out which post was affected as clicking the “We’ve had to remove content” notification did not give the full information.
Away from local news the same issue has also affected independent website the UK Defence Journal.
Original story, 4 June 2024: Small independent publishers in the UK are frustrated and confused about why some of their Facebook posts are being flagged as spam and removed.
Many small local news titles are heavily reliant on Facebook for content distribution and traffic.
The Independent Community News Network (ICNN) is aware of at least six of its member publishers who have had posts removed post-publication in the past month because they have been flagged as spam.
Press Gazette understands some regional news websites from major publishers are also being affected. (If you are from one of the major publishers and are seeing this or a similar issue with Facebook, please let us know on charlotte.tobitt@pressgazette.co.uk.)
Some of the posts have been restored after a review, but others have not and the publishers are frustrated at how difficult they say it has been to contact someone at Facebook owner Meta about the issue.
Island Echo editor and publisher Darren Toogood, based on the Isle of Wight, told Press Gazette he has had one post removed as “spam” without explanation: his site’s first about the general election.
“There was nothing spammy about it at all,” he said. “It was in no different format to any of the other stories that we do.
“Bearing in mind we’re publishing 6,500 stories a year, most of them go to Facebook, so we’re probably doing ten to 15, maybe sometimes 15 to 20 stories a day to Facebook, and it happened to be a general election post that was taken down.”
‘Perfectly good news stories’ being marked as spam on Facebook
He added: “If there’s five or ten of us all saying we’ve had this, you know the problem’s a lot wider than that because there will be other pages out there that aren’t part of a network or whatever that are seeing the same issues.”
The issue has proved a reminder about the power imbalance between Facebook and publishers for many of these small operations.
Toogood said: “They’ve got so much power over us and we need to be less reliant on them. We’re not too bad, we get about 30% of our website traffic from social media so we’re not as reliant as some people are.”
The owner of another small publisher, for whom Facebook makes up about 50% of traffic, told Press Gazette around ten of their posts over the past month have been removed.
These have been reviewed by Press Gazette and were all standard local news stories about, for example, crime, a by-election and new or revamped businesses.
They asked to remain anonymous as they are already fearful of their page being closed by Meta because of the amount of spam reports and did not want to exacerbate the issue.
Facebook said of at least one of the posts: “It looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way… Your post goes against our Community Standards on spam.”
‘You get a sick feeling when you see a notification’
The publisher said: “It’s very frustrating. These are local stories about local people and issues, businesses, events.
“When you’re having removed articles about, I don’t know, the little walking football group – I mean, those people will have shared that and they’re celebrating their news and then it’s being removed. Not very community spirited, is it?
“And to just have all this stuff sitting there in review or not even being given the option of review is really frustrating. There doesn’t seem to be any way to speak to anyone or try to get it sorted out, and it has an impact on your business – not to mention every time you see a notification you get a little bit of a sick feeling.”
ICNN director Emma Meese told Press Gazette said of the overall issue and this publisher in particular: “We are hearing from increasing numbers of people whose posts – perfectly good news stories – have been marked as spam.
“And then they’re getting various notifications. Sometimes they can just dispute/challenge the fact that it’s been taken down and in most instances the story’s reinstated. But we have got one member who’s been really badly hit.”
Some of the publishers involved have received notifications saying Meta does not have enough staff to look at the issue due to the Covid-19 outbreak, posing questions about whether it is an old bug that has resurfaced. In March 2020 Facebook blamed a spate of posts about the pandemic being marked as spam on a “bug in an anti-spam system”.
‘A stark reminder we’re not in full control’
Meese said: “This is a stark reminder that we’re not in full control of our business. When the platforms change the algorithms or when the platforms have a bug, that can have a catastrophic impact on the business in hand. This is just another reminder really of not putting too much emphasis on reaching audiences via third-party platforms.”
Referral traffic to almost 800 news websites from Facebook has fallen by 58% in the last six years, according to the latest Press Gazette analysis. In the last year alone the fall was 50%.
Meese added that the timing of the run-up to the general election was an additional concern: “Posts are being removed without rhyme or reason – there doesn’t seem to be any pattern on the style, it could be an events listing, it could be a crime story, it could be something political.
“And then obviously going into a general election we have to be incredibly careful about balance and bias and if stories are being removed without any input or say so from the news publisher then that obviously can have a really adverse impact if it might appear that they’re showing bias when it might just be that posts are being removed without their say so.
“So I think with this glitch it’s more important than ever that it gets sorted now because of the potential impact, because of the political timing of it, because of the general election.
Within the past few days Meese has managed to make contact with someone at Meta but is frustrated at how difficult it has been to raise the issue.
She said: “It’s disappointing when a large tech organisation such as Meta spent a number of years courting news organisations, investing in news and then withdrew overnight and the impact that’s had on news publishers, particularly smaller ones, has been huge.
“And to have asked people to invest their time, their effort and the core of their businesses to reach audiences on the Meta platform and to now not have any contact whatsoever for news for our members, so for news publishers to have no way whatsoever of getting an answer, is really disappointing.”
In September last year Meta said it would wind down payments for publishers through its Facebook News tab in the UK, France and Germany as well as end funding for the Community News Project.
Meta has been approached for comment.
New data from the Public Interest News Foundation published last week found small, independent and mostly local UK news outlets are facing a dramatic reduction in revenue and audience.
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