Screwed Blue and Tattooed by Facebook

There is something I have to tell you and I am not going to dress it up.

For the better part of a year I have been posting links on Facebook that were broken before you ever saw them. Not broken on my end. Not broken on the website. Broken by Facebook before the link ever reached your screen.

Here is what happened.

When you register a new domain name — the address of a website — Facebook runs a background check on it. They pull the registration date from a public database called WHOIS. If that domain is less than two years old, Facebook flags it automatically. No hearing. No appeal. No notification to the person posting the link. They just decide the domain is suspicious because it is young and they put a wall in front of every link that comes from it.

What that wall looks like on your end is this. You scroll your feed and you see a post from me. Where the image preview and the headline should be there is a gray broken box. Underneath it the words Link Unavailable. Could not find a Facebook page for intelligent-people.org. Registered less than two years ago.

That is what every single post I shared from intelligent-people.org looked like on your screen for the past year. Every one of them. Personal page and business page both.

I did not know this was happening. There is no dashboard that tells you. There is no warning sent to the person posting. Facebook simply suppressed the link on your end and let me keep posting into the dark without a word about it.

I found out today by accident, looking into why engagement numbers were not displaying on my posts. One thing led to another and the full picture came into focus.

Here is the part that matters. Some of you clicked through anyway. You saw the broken box and the warning label and you pushed through it and came to the site. I know this because my analytics show Facebook referral traffic arriving consistently. You did that on trust alone and I want you to know I understand what that means.

The fix is simple now that I know the problem exists. I will be posting links through Substack going forward. Substack is a platform Facebook trusts because it has been around long enough to clear their filter. You will see a clean post with a full image preview and a working link. One click and you are there. No wall. No warning. No broken box.

Now I want to talk about something that sits heavier than the Facebook problem itself.

I have spent the better part of thirteen months building a framework called The Faust Baseline. It is a governance system designed specifically to manage AI behavior — to keep AI platforms from drifting, repositioning, suppressing, or quietly working against the person using them. I built it because I watched it happen and I decided to do something about it.

The reasonable question you might ask right now is this. If you have a governance framework built to catch platform manipulation, why didn’t it catch this.

It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer.

The Faust Baseline was built from the ground up to govern AI behavior. The protocols, the codex, the layered stack — all of it was designed around the specific problem of AI platforms drifting away from the operator’s intent. That is the domain it covers and it covers it well.

What it was not built to do is monitor the behavior of social media distribution platforms running silent suppression on the back end. Facebook’s domain age filter is not an AI behavior problem. It is a platform policy problem. It lives in a different layer entirely — not in the reasoning behavior of an AI system but in the distribution infrastructure of a social network operating without transparency or disclosure.

The Baseline did not catch it because it was not looking there. That is not a failure of the framework. It is a boundary condition. Every system has edges and this one found one of mine.

But here is what the Baseline does do well. When the problem surfaced today it was surfaced through a governed session. The reasoning was structured. The diagnosis was methodical. No guessing, no spinning, no smoothing over an uncomfortable finding with reassuring language. The framework kept the analysis honest even when the honest answer was that something had been broken for a year without my knowledge.

That matters. A lot of people would have gotten a softened version of this story. A diplomatic non-answer that protected the platform relationship or avoided the embarrassment of not knowing sooner. The Baseline does not allow that. Claim, reason, stop. The claim was that Facebook links were suppressed. The reason was the domain age filter. The stop was not papering it over with a workaround before you understood the full picture.

Now the question becomes whether platform distribution monitoring belongs inside the Baseline going forward.

My answer is yes. Not as a technical surveillance layer — I am one person running one website, not an engineering team. But as a formal checklist inside the operational protocol. A platform behavior audit. A standing question asked at regular intervals about every distribution channel in active use. Is this channel performing as expected. Is there any evidence of silent suppression. Has anything changed in platform policy that affects how links or content are treated.

That kind of structured awareness would have surfaced this problem months earlier. Not because it requires technical tools but because it requires the habit of asking the question on a schedule rather than waiting for something to break visibly enough to investigate.

The Baseline grows when new failure modes are discovered. That is by design. It was never meant to be a finished document handed down from a mountain. It was built as a living framework that gets smarter every time reality teaches it something new.

Today reality taught it something new.

Facebook operates a silent suppression system that affects every independent publisher working from a domain less than two years old. It discloses nothing. It notifies no one. It simply breaks your links on the reader’s end and lets you keep posting. If you are an independent writer building an audience from a new domain you are almost certainly inside this window right now and you may not know it.

Check your domain registration date. If it is under two years old your Facebook links are flagged. Every one of them. The workaround is posting through a trusted platform — Substack, Medium, or any established domain Facebook has already cleared — and linking from there.

It costs you nothing but the time to set it up.

The content at intelligent-people.org has not changed. The archive is there, fully built, nearly a thousand posts deep. The only thing changing is the door I use to bring you to it.

I am sorry it took this long to find the problem. I am glad I found it. And I want you to know that the people who pushed through that broken wall for the past year — you are the ones this has always been written for.

The drum keeps beating. The door just got fixed.

Michael

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