Why You Haven’t Heard about the Thing You Can’t Say on Facebook

The Thing You Can’t Say on Facebook

Have you ever heard about the social media website Tsu.co? I’m going to guess that most of you haven’t, and that’s mostly because we now know that;

• The first rule of Facebook is you don’t talk about Tsu
• The second rule of Facebook is you don’t talk about Tsu
• The third rule of Facebook is you don’t talk about Tsu

Actually, it’s not just Facebook directly, but also Instagram and Messenger are actively blocking any instance of the web address, so much so, that Facebook has backdated the ban, deleting more than 1 million Facebook posts, including images, videos and comments that ever mentioned Tsu.co.

So what the hell is going on? I hear you ask.

“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, a new social network which claims to share advertising revenue with its users. The site keeps 10%, you keep 45% and your friends which you invited split the rest. If that sounds a little bit like a pyramid scheme, it’s because it’s pretty obvious it is. Of course, people love money, so there’s certainly an incentive to use the service over the current business models at Facebook, but to me, it sounds a little too good to be true and not worth the hassle.

Tsu

“Tsu said it had been receiving a decent amount of traffic from Facebook, averaging more than 2,534 visits a day. When that dropped to zero, Tsu appealed to Facebook, arguing that it didn’t violate Facebook’s terms of service, because it did not pay users to push content to Facebook.” said CNN.

“We do not allow developers to incentivize content sharing on our platform because it encourages spammy sharing,” said Melanie Ensign, a Facebook spokesperson.

Facebook

If Facebook didn’t ban this, there’s a chance that social media channels could quickly become flooded with links to Tsu, as people try to earn extra revenue, suddenly sharing your photos becomes financially motivated, rather than just socialising. Facebook has now marked the links as spam as of September 25th.

Is Facebook trying to stop a competitor stealing their users, or is this a smart move to block what could be seen as a scam in the long run? Who knows, but one thing is for certain, you sure as hell can’t type Tsu.co into Facebook to talk about it.