Sat, 02 Nov 2013
Censored on Facebook
For the first time in what feels like years, I wanted to share something with my friends on Facebook.
The background was that I read a note on Slashdot that Linus Torvalds thought a presidential candidate's remarks on a topic related to airline security were "moron"ic. So I did my own research, and I disagreed. I figured this was a topic of general enough interest that all my Facebook friends might be interested in knowing my position, so I wanted to share that.
Facebook didn't let me.
I tried first with a link to snopes.com, which blocked me with the rationale that http://snopes.com/images/template/snopes.gif is "spammy or unsafe":
Then I thought I'd be clever, and I linked to the .nyud.net version of the snopes page on the topic. I earned the same message that my post included a blocked link.
So then I tried again, with a link to a video on YouTube of the same clip.
That's when I first got the extremely generic message that "The message could not be posted to this Wall." You can see the animation of what happened next by hovering below.
Finally, I removed all the links, and kept the first bit of text. For this, I got the same generic error: "The message could not be posted to this Wall."
Update: Patrick points out I should link to the actual video. Here it is, embedded:
(BTW: The first thing I did was to click "let us know" to indicate that I think I'm seeing this by mistake. I filled out the form to indicate there was a problem in an honest, respectful way. I got back an email autoresponse that said, "Thanks for taking the time to submit this report. While we don't currently provide individual support for this issue, this information will help us identify bugs on our site.")
