Tsu.co is a social media website that rewards its members for sharing posts, photos, videos and the like. Users who get others to join via referrals see cash benefits in the like. Naturally, when you have an opportunity to make free money doing what you do everyday, you do it right?
But, what would be the natural place to get referrals to sign up? Where could you access as many people – strangers and friends alike – to get them to see said link? You go to Facebook. This isn’t some imaginary scenario, as a matter of fact it is real. Tsu.co posts, mostly referral links, were becoming huge during 2014 and early 2015. I couldn’t check my Facebook without seeing a post with someones link in the newsfeed, or having a message from some friends of mine asking me to join with that link.
What was quite annoying to me, seemed to become quite the little bugger to Facebook Inc. As of September 25th, the Tsu.co address has been blocked by Facebook. In fact, it’s even been reported to have been blocked on Instagram, and other Facebook owned applications. Any mention of the address is blocked, and the company even insured the censoring of the site address by removing every single old post on their servers that mentioned the site/URL; effectively killing off millions of photos, videos, and posts in an instant.
You can still write ‘Tsu,’ but any mentions of Tsu.co will not be submitted and will be removed.
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| source: CNN money |
Much like their other site-widely blocked sites, Facebook claims the link is spam and is annoying to the community. In return, Tsu thinks that Facebook is being a bully, who is killing off competition.
“We’re persona non grata,” said Sebastian Sobczak, who founded Tsu. “You can type in all sorts of seedy websites, and you can get to them. But not us. We don’t exist.”
Tsu had made an appeal to Facebook when their traffic source fail from an average 2,000 per day to a flat 0. However, their reasoning didn’t work. Facebook, however, says it will unblock Tsu if one thing changes: if Tsu users cannot post to Tsu.co and Facebook.com at the same time.
“We do not allow developers to incentivize content sharing on our platform because it encourages spammy sharing,” said Melanie Ensign, a Facebook spokesperson.
Most of Tsu.co users spoken to (who haven’t made even a dime from the service), thought that this block was unfair to the service.