The Facebook Shim
This is my second page on the Facebook Shim. My first was that I suspected that links to this and other websites that I run were not being handled by Facebook in a manner that I expected.
It appeared that URLs that were placed in Facebook posts were not allowed to be pointed to my websites without some measure of obfuscation. This obfuscation was unclear to me at first but I concluded that the Facebook user was either not presented with the base URL and it was stipped from the post automatically and a warning was displayed that Facebook could not verify that the URL was not a trusted one.
On further investigation it was still not clear. However, any attempts to place a URL in a Facebook post resulted in a waste of time. For this reason I decided to develop my own "shim"
August 2024, I made another search after seeing some accesses to my first page on the shim. It seems that I was correct in assumptions. The explaination below is actually quite interesting as are some of the comments on the post.
To be fair, Facebook are being "transparent" about this technique.
The Facebook Site Integrity Team
- Protecting People
- Protect Privacy and Identity
- Enable More Accurate External Analytics
- plus others
I cannot see how my sites would be deternined as "safe" as they are not likely to be identified by any of their checks as I am just not that popular. It is only natural for Facebook to assume that I am "hostile". In any case, it stops their users being able to promote anything for free.