One of the tough things about joining Facebook these days is they are a little aggressive on the bot/spam limiting on new accounts. When our publisher decided to put us on FB we were getting messages about not letting us post to protect from spam. We finally got that worked out.
Side Note: If you find our reporting useful, please consider donating! https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-local-journalism-support-big-bend-times
As a site that goes directly against a person who many people describe as mentally ill, we knew there would be push back. One can imagine how many complaints Flash has sent to FB about us. We hope that Meta is taking it all in stride. After all, arguing on FB is where they make their money.
People on FB may have noticed a post we did that we didn’t explain much when we posted it. Our FB account received a message from another FB user. When we received it we couldn’t see the user’s profile. An hour or so later it showed up and was a persons in Italy. There was nothing in their profile to indicate they work for Meta. This is what the body of the message looks like:
As one can see, it’s a strange message that doesn’t make a any sense. One would think that if Meta wanted to contact someone about a serious issue with their account, they would send a more polished message. Here is the contents of the PDF:
The document says submit an appeal, but the link below says Start the verification. That Start the verification but is linked to this URL:
https://shorten.world/-0pRj?Meta/business/help/308979828303560?id=579726174359330
Seems strange that Meta would send a PDF with a link that uses a URL shortener. Very suspicious. Checking the link on a few link checkers and there is no obvious malware associated. But… the URL does redirect to www.google.com. Why would Meta be sending shortened links that redirect to Google. Simple answer, they wouldn’t. This is another sad attempt by someone to get our publisher to click on a suspicious link. Perhaps someone is just sending these messages to any FB page admin they can find. I mean, it couldn’t be that there is a specific person who would directly target our publisher. I mean, who would even consider doing something like that?
We responded to the person and they did not respond back, so we reported the message to Meta.
This is their profile: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100007864218200
