So yesterday I wrote a post about how the Susan G. Komen foundation has now become inextricably linked with religion and politics, thanks to their actions regarding Planned Parenthood and Karen Handel in the past week or two.
It wasn’t a controversial post: I didn’t take a stand on religion, politics, abortion or Planned Parenthood – only on how getting associated with controversial topics like that can have serious, long-term consequences for your brand.
Imagine my surprise, then, when this morning a couple of people let me know that the link I posted (which was automatically fed to my Facebook account from my Twitter account) was being ‘blocked’ by Facebook. I wish I’d done a screen cap, but basically what happened was when you tried to click on the link, a notice popped up saying that Facebook had blocked the link on improper ‘terms of use’ grounds. There was nothing wrong with the blog or my website itself, and when I posted the link to a friend’s page, it wasn’t blocked or flagged.
I don’t know what happened. Did someone complain about the title of the post? Did someone complain about the blog post itself? If so, who complained? And why? Or did a Facebook algorithm just not like my use of ‘religion’ and ‘lethal’ in the same headline?
Facebook offered no reason, of course, and no way to get to the bottom of it.
A couple of people have suggested that I not write this follow-up, lest I get in bigger trouble with Facebook. But I wrote the piece in the first place because I noticed that other people seemed reluctant to talk about it, and it gets my goat that I have to be leery of making what seemed to me an obvious – and not particularly incendiary – connection based on a topic that’s had widespread media coverage.
Anyway, go read the original blog post, and let me know: Is it really the kind of thing that Facebook should be blocking?