I don’t believe that our coverage of the Marion County raid or Kansas Legislature led to the digital purge of Kansas Reflector content. But I can’t say that for certain, because Facebook has been maddeningly opaque about the entire situation. Stone outright denied that the likeliest target — a column from documentary filmmaker Dave Kendall criticizing the platform — was the culprit.
But his technical explanation, given in a Friday afternoon phone call with editor in chief Sherman Smith, left us scratching our heads.
“It had nothing to do with the content. It had nothing to do with the story that you guys wrote,” Stone said. He instead blamed a domain issue with three separate websites, all of which operate separately and just happened to have posted Kendall’s column.
“It was a security issue related to the Kansas Reflector domain, along with the News From The States domain and The Handbasket domain,” he added. “It was not this particular story. It was at the domain level.”
A fourth site - Little Green Footballs - was also blocked and marked as phishing/malicious. They didn’t understand why until they saw this story and went to look to see if a commenter had posted it. They had. WTF? Meta Cancels LGF
Sad to say, that’s not an effective way to find new readers.
They don’t get much traffic from facebook. But being libelled by facebook has worried a lot of their readership and consumed a lot of their time.
It’s a long article but worth reading in full.