Facebook Rigorously Removes News Articles Mentioning Pirate Service “MagisTV”

Facebook has several anti-piracy tools and technologies to keep problematic content off the platform. This apparently includes automated keyword filters that ban mentions of piracy-related terms, regardless of the context. This resulted in the removal of several MagisTV news articles, including a press release from anti-piracy coalition ACE. Trying to spot these errors is not without risk either, as Facebook bans repeat offenders.

Similar to other social media platforms, Facebook has to battle a constant stream of copyrighted material, much of it posted by users who have no permission to do so.

To facilitate this process, the company has rolled out several anti-piracy initiatives in recent years.

Automated Piracy Takedowns

For example, Facebook uses its “Rights Manager” tool to automatically detect infringing material and allow owners to take down or monetize the content. In addition, Facebook also uses third-party tools and in-house technology to address the problem.

With these proactive tools, the social media giant hopes to help copyright holders protect their rights. At the same time, it also keeps the takedown notice volume low, which saves resources.

While automated removal algorithms can work well, they are not infallible. This applies to keyword blacklists in particular, since on Facebook they appear to ban links to all content that simply mention forbidden words.

Facebook Bans MagisTV Mentions

A few days ago, Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today informed us that Facebook flagged a post linking to one of his articles as potentially copyright infringing. The article in question is a news roundup that linked to a recent article we published on the popular piracy app MagisTV.

Neither of the articles linked to any problematic material. On the contrary, it showed how the piracy app failed to secure a trademark while facing severe malware allegations.

To rule out the possibility this was some kind of outlier, we posted the Plagiarism Today article and the original TorrentFreak article on Facebook ourselves, which resulted in near-instant removals.

“We removed your content,” Facebook writes in a short message, adding that “it may contain something that’s not allowed for copyright reasons,” which goes against its intellectual property Terms of Service.

Facebook Removes News from Anti-Piracy Coalition ACE

These tests suggest that Facebook has an issue with mere mentions of the term ‘MagisTV’. But would Facebook flag news articles authored by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, a global anti-piracy coalition under the Motion Picture Association, that continuously works to shut MagisTV down?

This question was swiftly answered when we posted an ACE press release mentioning MagisTV convictions on Facebook. Just a few minutes after it was published, the post was removed for copyright reasons.

Apparently, simply mentioning MagisTV is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service. This is clearly an automated removal error, as none of the links or articles violate Facebook’s terms.

Banned for Posting News

Facebook’s automated removal rules are obviously not working perfectly. However, the platform allows affected accounts to appeal decisions, which is exactly what we did when the first post was removed last Wednesday.

After five days, we still hadn’t heard back, so we decided to post a more recent article on MagisTV raids and arrests to see if these errors persist. And indeed they did; the article was swiftly taken down again.

In hindsight, that was a step too far, as the account we used was suspended with a threat to permanently disable it. We don’t feel the urgent need to appeal, but it’s not difficult to see how this could cause a lot of trouble for those heavily reliant on Facebook.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Posted Tuesday 29 July 2025 at 9:16 am AEST (my time).

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