The officers had allegedly tried to gather information about members of the University of Tartu korp! Sakala alumni fraternity, in connection with a real estate purchase the fraternity made.

State representatives ERR has spoken to say that they are not involved in restricting the propagation of information.

Toomas Mattson, adviser to the auditor general and an opinion leader in Estonia, posted on his own Facebook account on Sunday: "I simply posted today a link to a story on ERR's website about a student fraternity, with intro text stating this was a test to see how quickly the ecosystem would remove it."

"The removal notification arrived one to seconds after posting," Matson went on.

"If you read the explanation contained in the message further, it transpires they have qualified the post as spam, and then me as a propagator of spam," he added.

The author of the original Estonian-language version of this piece obtained a similar result when they posted a link to the same article, prefaced with a comment that this was also test (see screen grab below).

A few seconds after this was posted, they, too received a message that it had been removed as spam.

However, when colleagues posted the link to the same article some time later, it remained in their news feed.

Bearing in mind that the article could be viewed as inconvenient for the ISS and perhaps the state more widely, ERR inquired if they could have been behind the obstacles to posting the news story.

However, representatives of both the ISS, known in Estonian by the abbreviation Kapo, and the government's communications office categorically denied any such action had taken place.

ISS spokesperson Harrys Puusepp told ERR on Monday: "No, Kapo has not attempted to restrict the broadcast of the article in this post. Kapo does have some means to contact Meta in order to draw attention to content that is hostile to the Estonian state or which threatens its security, but there was no reason in this case to do so."

"These options are similar in essence to those available to the general user: Either Meta's own terms of use are being violated, or the posting of the content is in some way illegal or a threat to national security. The Estonian security authority does not have control over an international firm as to what posts it allows to be published within its environment," Puusepp went on.

"I have no information that either Meta's own regulations or Estonian laws are being violated, or that this in any way threatens national security," Puusepp added.

He said: "In the Estonian state, there is no censorship, and no authority may curb the dissemination of information in any way. As to why Meta doesn't permit some links to be shared, you would have to ask them."

Several experts in the field, who spoke to ERR on condition of anonymity, theorized that since Meta uses artificial intelligence (AI) to moderate the content of its media, the automatic decision to block the article may have originated from this mechanism, since the ISS, as a security agency, may have set some alarm bells ringing.

At the same time it could also have played a role if an article was being shared with a frequency which prompted AI to could denote it as spam.

Similarly, several people ERR spoke to also noted that it is not particularly easy for the state to prevent the distribution of an article of that kind, despite having direct contacts with Meta, as doing so requires first justifying the act to the tech firm.

Meta works on the basis of its own general principles, and Estonia, as a particularly small state, is certainly not afforded any special treatment in this arena.

One expert said: "This case appears to be a strange one, but I don't see any red flags here which should activate Meta's AI here."

ERR had not at the time of writing received comment from Meta.

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