Facebook, which controls content on its platform through a combination of AI and human review, frequently struggles with mistaking legitimate content for hate speech, and vice versa, leaving up posts that are objectionable, and have lead to real-life violence.

In his story describing the snafu, Stinnett raises another issue with the platform: the troubled relationship between Facebook and the media. He argues that his paper uses Facebook for free, “so the newspaper has little grounds for complaint other than the silliness of it.”

But Stinnett also acknowledges how entrenched Facebook has become in many publication’s businesses: ”The problem The Vindicator faces is that it has become dependent, perhaps too dependent, on Facebook to communicate with local residents and to promote the newspaper.”

The paper questioned whether to put up the rest of the Declaration of Independence after the removal, because if Facebook found more content to be unpalatable, The Vindicator could lose its page on the platform, and thus a crucial way to disseminate its content.

While larger publications have been suffering from Facebook’s decision to lessen the number of news stories in the News Feed, the company has pledged that it would support local journalism.

This post has been updated with comment from Facebook.

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