Meta has been accused of forcibly removing and blocking links posted on Facebook to a competitive platform.
Mark Zuckerberg’s media giant is allegedly taking down any links to the competing platform "pixelfed.social" - a decentralised photo-sharing platform - labelling them as “spam”.
According to 404 media, a Bluesky user named AJ Sadauskas first posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted.
Bluesky is an X competitor in the social media space founded by entrepreneur Jack Dorsey in 2019.
404 Media reported that they tested the theory by trying to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook and that it was also immediately deleted.
The decision is said to have been justified to users as being in accordance with Facebook's "Community Standards on spam".
This comes just days after Zuckerberg announced plans to replace fact-checking measures on all Meta platforms with “community notes” similar to the censorship tools used by Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter).
Zuckerberg said in a statement that these measures were intended to “protect and restore free expression”.
Pixelfed.social launched in 2018 and operates as an open-source, community funded and decentralised image-sharing platform.
Its functions have been described as similar to Instagram in its capacity for sharing, liking and commenting on user-uploaded images.
Despite slowly growing over the years, the site has recently gained more attention experiencing an increase in user signups in the days following Meta’s announcement.
Pixelfed said in a post to Mastedon that it was experiencing “unprecedented levels of traffic to pixelfed.social, and we are working to keep the service up and provision additional resources!”
As a sign of solidarity, Pixelfed announced in another post to Mastodon on Monday, “Our iOS app will be available this week! Timing is everything.”
Creator of Pixelfed Daniel Supernault, added that “Pixelfed is a lot of things, but one thing it is not, is an opportunity for VC [venture capital] or others to ruin the vibe…Pixelfed is for the people, period.”
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