Facebook no longer allows its users to share links to The Pirate Bay on their timelines or in chat messages. The blockade follows similar measures taken against other pirate sites in previous weeks. This is not the first time Facebook has taken against against The Pirate Bay but the current measures go substantially further.

Ten years ago Facebook reached out to The Pirate Bay, asking the torrent site to remove the ‘share’ button from its site.

At the time, the torrent site was at the center of a high profile copyright infringement lawsuit, something the social media network didn’t want to be associated with.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Pirate Bay wasn’t very cooperative. The request remained unanswered which left Facebook with no other option than to block Pirate Bay URLs at its end.

“The Pirate Bay has not responded and so we have blocked their torrents from being shared on Facebook,” the company told us at the time.

Today, more than a decade later, the “share” button on The Pirate Bay is long gone. Somewhere during this period, Facebook’s ban was also lifted. When the social media site started blocking several other torrent sites a few weeks ago, we noticed that TPB was not among them.

However, this changed recently. When we reviewed Facebook’s blocking efforts a few days ago we noticed that The Pirate Bay is now blocked as well. Similar to the other pirate sites, it apparently violates the platform’s “community standards.”

People who want to use Facebook to post a link to The Pirate Bay will see the following error message instead; “You can’t share this link. Your post couldn’t be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards.”

https://torrentfreak.com/images/tpbbanned.png

Similarly, all Pirate Bay links are blocked in Facebook’s Messenger chats as well, returning a similar notification.

Facebook’s Community Standards and its Terms of Service allow the platform to take action against potential intellectual property infringements, which is likely what triggered this action.

While The Pirate Bay is now blocked again by Facebook, the current ban is substantially different from the previous one. Ten years ago the site only prevented people from linking to actual torrent pages, while all URLs, including the homepage, are banned today.

It is apparent that Facebook is gradually expanding its ‘piracy’ blocking efforts. In addition to adding The Pirate Bay, 1337x.to was recently added as well, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if more URLs will follow.

Source: Torrentfreak.com