The last thing I wanted to do today was write about Threads. I haven’t been using it much, and the few times I’ve tried, I haven’t liked it much either. For one thing, they’re allowing some of the most toxic bigots from Twitter (e.g. LibsOfTikTok) to maintain a presence on Threads, and I didn’t quit Twitter just so I could tolerate that same poisonous crowd on another social media site.

But this story begins with an article at a small independent news site, The Kansas Reflector, who published a column criticizing Meta’s ad policy on climate change (to sum up, they’re squelching posts and rejecting ads related to climate change).

Marisa Kabas republished the column yesterday at her site, and then posted a link to Threads. Here’s her concise description of what happened next:

As soon as I posted the link to my republished version of the column on Threads (Meta’s version of Twitter), it was taken down and flagged as a violation of community standards on cybersecurity. Shortly thereafter, all links to my site were blocked on all Meta platforms, and anyone who’d ever posted a story of mine received an alert that the link had been taken down due to that same cybersecurity violation. The same thing happened to the Reflector the day before, as I reported.

I didn’t see any of this when it happened yesterday. But what got my attention were several emails from readers of LGF telling me their Facebook posts with links to LGF were suddenly being deleted, with messages saying it was a “cybersecurity” issue related to malware or phishing on the site. And one of those deleted posts was from 2009 — fifteen years ago.

Little Green Footballs has never been hacked or suffered a virus or any other major security failure in more than 20 years of operation. And here comes Meta, one of the biggest internet corporations in the world, telling people LGF is dangerous and might infect their computers with malware, which, I don’t know, kind of seems like libel to me.

So I tested posting a link to LGF at Threads, and it wouldn’t even let me paste in the URL. As soon as I pasted it into their posting dialog, the link vanished and this message appeared:

LGF has been canceled. LibsOfTikTok is still there.

You may be wondering how this is connected to Marisa Kabas’s article. Well, when I finally did read about her experience last night, I had a hunch and searched our comments, and sure enough, there was a link to her post in there.

Possibilities? Either somebody at Meta got BIG MAD about that article, or an automated moderation system was set into motion and is now running amok. (Maybe both.) The fact that LGF was totally banned across all Meta sites at the same time as Marisa Kabas’s site, with the same type of nonsensical “cybersecurity” warning, after posting the same link, seems too similar to be coincidental.

I posted at Threads and tagged Meta’s Adam Mosseri, asking him what was going on and to please review and lift this absurd prohibition. (I don’t expect an answer.) Here’s a link to that post, but I guess I should probably also put up a screenshot in case they just cancel my account entirely.