The new restrictions are a test which is explicitly not supposed to impact these entities.

Daniel Starks is the communications manager for Greenville, Texas, a city of about 35,000. He oversees nearly a dozen Facebook pages the city maintains. Recently, the page for the city's library was notified it could no longer post more than two links a month.

"You can add links to 2 posts per month, and you've used them all," a message said. Sharing additional links would require signing up for a Meta One subscription that would cost $50 or more a month.

Starks is one of a growing number of people to encounter Meta's ongoing experiment with charging creators, businesses and other professionals to post links on Facebook. Meta says the test, which is part of its push to sell more subscriptions, isn't supposed to affect pages for nonprofits or government entities. But that's not the case, according to nonprofit leaders who spoke with Engadget. All have pages that are identified as nonprofits and have been approved to use Meta's fundraising tools, which requires a separate verification process. Many are now rethinking how they use the platform.

"More than half of what we do as a city, is linking back to information on our website," Starks tells Engadget. " Worried the city's other pages would soon be hit with similar restrictions, Starks instructed his staff to stop posting links in Facebook posts altogether. He made a graphic explaining to the city's Facebook followers that relevant URLs would now appear in the page's comments instead.

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