Why Facebook Blocks Coronavirus News Stories?
Yesterday, Facebook users complained that links to news stories and information related to the coronavirus outbreak were blocked by the company’s automated system.
It happened to us too, when we published an article about Coronavirus’s impact on different industries, as when we posted it on Facebook, the post got blocked along with all our articles, which left us wondering what happened?
We started to search for the reason, unpublished the article, emailed Facebook asking for the reason and to unblock us.
After we’ve done all the above, we started to search if there are others who experience the same issue, and we found out that it’s a global problem concerning any news article has Coronavirus in the title.
Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, said that the company was working on a fix for the problem.
We’ve restored all the posts that were incorrectly removed, which included posts on all topics – not just those related to COVID-19. This was an issue with an automated system that removes links to abusive websites, but incorrectly removed a lot of other posts too.
— Guy Rosen (@guyro) March 18, 2020
How to Appeal Your Domain Block on Facebook?
The problem was fixed this morning, and all our articles are now live on Facebook. However, if you still facing the issue, you can notify Facebook about your publication domain using Facebook Sharing Debugger.
Go to Facebook Sharing Debugger – type in your domain name – press Debug; if you get the following message, your domain is blocked by the Facebook automated system. If you think you’ve been blocked by mistake, click “let us know,” and the team will contact you in 24 hours.
