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A comment on Facebook blocks sharing of critical Guardian article. Parent comment

Re:Facebook blocks sharing of critical Guardian article by dvtrn on Friday September 28, 2018 @04:39PM (#18096857)
Looking at some of the tweets it seems FB has a mechanism that autoflags article links as spam if "too many people are trying to share" it.

This just makes me wonder exactly how automated that feature is, because surely a non-nominal number of people share current event links all the time about something political, sporting event, natural disaster. I wonder if it happens then, or is this a matter of recency....Streisand (there's got to be a better word for it than that) following the news of those 50million accounts being breached.

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Re:Facebook blocks sharing of critical Guardian article by Splines on Friday September 28, 2018 @05:42PM (#18097297)
What I don't understand is why this is considered spam. Are lots of people not allowed to talk about the same thing?
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Re:Facebook blocks sharing of critical Guardian article by lozenge on Friday September 28, 2018 @06:07PM (#18097440)
I can think of a couple of possible explanations:

1. Viral content like "share this or Facebook will delete your account" - may as well shut that down straight away.

2. A security flaw in a Facebook site that lets malicious websites post to your wall automatically from a webpage. In that case, the malicious website will probably post a link to itself, so that it can collect more victims. In this case, this limits the impact of the flaw. Look at the Samy worm as an example.

3. News feed algorithm "breaks" in some way when a lot of people are posting the same thing, so they just prevent that from happening.

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