Everything is Spam on Facebook Unless It is Paid Post (or Actual Spam)

Have you tried sharing any interesting articles from It's FOSS on Facebook in the past few months?

If yes, you may have seen a message that your post was removed.

It doesn't matter if it was shared by It's FOSS Facebook page or a reader like you on their wall. You share a URL from itsfoss.com or news.itsfoss.com, it gets removed as 'spam'.

The above message was for this article on suggested things to do after installing Ubuntu 24.04. Is this spam? You be the judge.

The problem started to get worst for us, as any link we share would be removed in a few hours.

If you are technically aware and want to advise about posting the links in the caption of images or as the first comment, we did that, too.

It didn't work.

Any link from itsfoss.com or news.itsfoss.com would get instantly flagged as Spam.

It's not just It's FOSS

And this is just not It's FOSS. It appears that independent, small publishers across the world are suffering from Facebook's highhandedness.

Publishers around the world hit by Facebook labelling news as spam

Small independent publishers are frustrated and confused about why some of their Facebook posts are being flagged as spam and removed.

Press GazetteCharlotte Tobitt

It hurts the small publishers who are dependent on Facebook to get some traffic.

What's even more unfortunate is that Facebook removed posts from the official openSUSE page and cited 'cybersecurity' as the reason.

And then our favorite DistroWatch noticed that their posts are being removed by Facebook for 'hosting of malicious software'.

Their outburst got noticed by big publishers like The Register and after their reporting, Facebook apparently removed this ban and whitelisted distrowatch.com links. I am yet to confirm it.

It's spam only until you show the $$

Here's the fun stuff. If I "boost the post", meaning I pay Facebook to show the link post to our followers, it stays. It is no longer a spam.

Here's the last post I ran as an ad on Facebook.

But this is not the way. We cannot afford to pay Facebook $20 for every article we publish here.

And what pains me even more is that I see all kinds of actual spam, hate message and fake news on Facebook. If I report them, all I get is a message that 'the post does NOT go against Facebook Community Standards' 🤷

What option do we have?

Not much. It's a feeling of helplessness but we are a small player and there is not much we can do.

We have over 130,000 people on our Facebook page. We continue posting the images and videos for our regular followers. We don't share links to news or tutorials anymore. Which is unfortunate because this is the stuff which has more value than a meme.

Please don't share this article on Facebook 🤫