Restrictions hitting local news pages on Facebook have been described as “an attack on local journalism”.
Iliffe Media’s Kent Online was the latest site affected, spending a week with its presence in the Facebook news feed “restricted”.
Kent Online saw referral traffic from Facebook down by about 48% week on week as a result.
Its page, which has 234,000 followers, was restricted after publishing a link to a court story by crown court reporter Julia Roberts about the trial of three men over the alleged rape and sexual abuse of a child.
The restriction was lifted on Wednesday afternoon (21 May) after Press Gazette got in touch with the Facebook press office – the third such time this has happened in the past month.
The admin account for independent publisher Leicester Gazette was disabled days before local elections were held in the area after being told it “doesn’t follow our community standards on account integrity”. Facebook described what happened as an “error” after Press Gazette got in touch.
A Facebook page for Kent Online sister brand KMFM was temporarily taken down for a “breach of community standards” after posting a different court story about a sex offender who used the dark web to make indecent images of children.
The page was quickly reinstated after a successful appeal but the personal page, and Messenger and Instagram accounts, of the journalist who posted it was deactivated for days until Press Gazette intervened.
Otherwise multiple publishers have been finding there is no way to effectively appeal such restrictions with Facebook itself.
‘In everybody’s interests’ for Facebook to implement better procedures ASAP
From next year Facebook will have to follow new rules under the Online Safety Act, to be enforced by Ofcom, meaning it must notify news publishers if it plans to take action against any of their content and give them an opportunity to make representations.
But Facebook was urged to implement new procedures as soon as possible rather than waiting for the law to come into force.
Iliffe Media chief operating officer Ian Carter told Press Gazette: “We are grateful our account has now been restored, and also to Press Gazette for continuing to highlight and fight for issues impacting our industry.
“We lost a significant amount of audience while this ‘ban’ was in place. Following recent incidents involving the Leicester Gazette and our own KMFM page, I hope Meta puts procedures in place to ensure publishers do not fall foul of such arbitrary action.
“Providing exemptions for legitimate publishers will of course become law when all sections of the Online Safety Act are in place, so it is in everybody’s interests for those processes to be implemented now.”
Meta urged to ‘rethink approach’
News Media Association chief executive Owen Meredith said: “The restriction of local news websites such as Kent Online by Facebook is an attack on local journalism and demonstrates why the overweening dominance of the tech platforms has to be tackled urgently by the Competition and Markets Authority, using its new powers.
“The Online Safety Act contains specific measures to protect news publishers from this kind of arbitrary removal by dominant social media platforms; I hope Ofcom will take action to ensure Facebook and others abide by the law.
“Restricting access to local journalism undermines local communities’ access to trusted information, weakening local democracy. Meta must now correct this injustice, and I urge them to rethink their approach and immediately reinstate access to local news websites on its platform.”
What Online Safety Act will mean for news on Facebook
The Online Safety Act passed into law in October 2023 and has so far set out illegal content duties for services like Facebook to comply with and child protection safety duties.
However services classed as ‘Category 1’ by Ofcom will have to offer “protections for news publisher and journalistic content, and content of democratic importance”.
The conditions for being classed as Category 1 – which means Facebook looks set to be included – are either that a platform uses a content recommender system and has more than 34 million UK users, or that it lets users forward or reshare user-generated content, uses a content recommender system, and has more than 7 million UK users.
Ofcom is currently preparing its register of categorised services and has said it will publish this in the summer.
It will then consult on its proposed guidance and codes for platforms’ duties to news publishers duties and journalistic content by early 2026.
The protections for news will apply to content from “recognised” news publishers, defined in the Online Safety Act as either the holder of an Ofcom broadcast licence which publishes news-related material, or an entity that meets criteria such as:
- Its principal purpose is the publication of news-related material which is created by different people and subject to editorial control;
- It publishes such material in the course of a business (but this can be non-profit);
- It is subject to a standards code;
- It has a registered office/business address in the UK.
Ofcom told Press Gazette earlier this month that enforcement announcements are expected in the coming months over other types of behaviour by Facebook that appear to breach the Online Safety Act.
There have been multiple recent examples flagged to Facebook of scam adverts impersonating high-profile journalists like CNN’s Richard Quest and the FT’s Martin Wolf to trick people into joining investment advice groups on Whatsapp, but such practices continue to proliferate.
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