Only yesterday, we told you that social networking giant Facebook had blocked all j.mp short URLs provided by parent company bit.ly for quite some time, on account of the rogue and malicious links that had started appearing on Facebook, although this limitation was applied to status and page updates only.
This is what was cited as a probable reason:
A possible explanation is that there were an unusual amount of rogue j.mp URLs linking to malicious websites or spam sites, triggering Facebook’s automatic blocking mechanism.
It was however said that Facebook was working with bit.ly to resolve the issue, and that more than 70% of j.mp links pointed to spam or “other security issues” at the time the block was imposed worldwide. Nevertheless, the limitation has been revoked and now j.mp links can be easily posted on Facebook, all across the globe.
There wasn’t much coming from bit.ly itself in regard to this particular issue, neither did they contradict the 70% spam and malware claim coming from Facebook, so it can be safely guessed that this just might have been the issue.
Regardless of the fact that this blockage has ended, not only Facebook users, but in general, users should be careful when clicking on short URLs as it is indeed quite hard to evade spam and malware on the internet.
Via TechCrunch