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Meta Is posting links to commercial content as part of a resource post allowed?

Speaking personally (I haven't consulted anybody else on the team), I don't see why this would be a problem so long as there's nothing sneaky or sketchy going on. Not all resources are freely avai...

posted 4y ago by Monica Cellio‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Monica Cellio‭ · 2020-08-20T02:54:45Z (over 4 years ago)
Speaking personally (I haven't consulted anybody else on the team), I don't see why this would be a problem so long as there's nothing sneaky or sketchy going on.  Not all resources are freely available online; if a book is relevant, I think a link is more helpful than just a citation.

Amazon might be trying to take over the world, but there's a reason people link to them a lot: their catalog is large.  If you find a book somewhere else, that should be fine too; we don't have preferred vendors.

I think there are a couple things we should be careful of:

- Self-promotion: I think this is fine; if the person who literally wrote the book on a topic shows up here, why wouldn't we welcome that person's contributions?  But I think we should ask people to disclose affiliations that *could appear* to be conflicts of interest, even if they aren't actually.  It doesn't need to be anything fancy -- "my book" or "(I work for this company)" or the like tells people what they need to know to evaluate the material.

- Link shorteners/obfuscators: please don't.  People should be able to tell where a link is going to take them before clicking.

- Don't be spammy: if you're adding a link even though its presence doesn't make the post better, you should probably leave it out.

Again, these are my personal suggestions, intended as a starting point for the conversation.  What do the rest of you think?