I’m gonna try to keep this brief…
One of my bands has a Facebook Page where we have links to YouTube demo videos. That was working fine for a while, but recently started giving errors like this:
Your first thought should be checking the “Visibility” of the YouTube videos: are they Private? No, they are not. They’re not even Unlisted. They are Public.
What’s more vexing is that clicking FB Page link to YouTube worked fine on desktops, like Mac or Windows. It only failed like this on mobile devices. And of course, all the videos play fine when you navigate to them directly in YouTube. Only the integration between Facebook Mobile and YouTube was broken. But of course, that’s the #1 audience we need to reach.
I also tried linking a Playlist rather than individual videos, but that didn’t help.
Could we have tried fixing the problem by deleting the videos and recreating them from scratch? Yes. Then we’d also lose all our views and comments, though, not to mention break any bookmarks and shares people may have already done. Obviously, that was a no-go. And as we will see, it wouldn’t have helped.
I tried reaching out to FB and using AI, but couldn’t find an answer. Meanwhile, we’re trying to drum up business with broken media.
Since it was clear to me that something about the relationship between FB mobile and YouTube was broken, I thought about how I can intercept that traffic, to disrupt their toxic relationship.
I looked into those redirection link providers. Back in the day we used to use “bounce.to”, but now popular hits are:
and countless others. There might be good free ones, but it started to feel like I was going to have choose between free vs. reliable. I could be wrong, but…
Then I remembered that our band had a website we weren’t using. Maybe I could put a redirection page there? I started scratching my head, trying to remember from back in the 90s how you put a redirect header in HTML… Then I realized that 30 years had passed since those days 
and there were probably better ways. I forgot that I had already set up WordPress for that site, even though it sat dormant. And a little help from Google’s Gemini AI hooked me up with a simple, free Redirection plugin for WordPress that I added to our site:
This made it super simple. You pick a “Source URL” which is really just a “slug”; ie, a fake page which can nonetheless be served by the web site. So I chose “demoreels”:
Then I supplied the Target URL which was obviously the YouTube playlist. That was pretty much it. When this was set up, navigating to “eventhegrowlers.com/demoreels” should redirect you to YouTube.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out of the box. But the error was different. I didn’t get that “This page isn’t available” error from above. I got to the band web site, eventhegrowlers.com, and was told the page could not be found. So that was progress.
But what explained the new error? Wasn’t FB linking people to “eventhegrowlers.com/demoreels”? No, it was not. FB was adding all kinds of spyware junk onto the end of the URL, breaking the redirection. It was taking a manageable YouTube Playlist link like:
“https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy1KEbfcF0Tk5ItmINK-Fm9YZApR2tUev&si=I12mmIDZ3zgnlkgY“
and converting it to a monstrosity like:
This is where the plugin really earned its kudos. I went into the settings and noticed that “Query Parameters” option, and changed it to “Ignore all parameters”:
I clicked Save, and instantly the “eventhegrowlers.com/demoreels” link started working 
.
It’s bad enough that FB is appending countless tracking data onto everything you click. But when it breaks basic integration with major sites like YouTube, it’s gone too far. This approach converted:
Old: FB > YouTube
New: FB > Website Redirect > YouTube
That middle hop gave me the opportunity to scrub the spyware off the URL, which doubled as a fix to the broken link.
As a bonus, now that I had a reliable “permalink” to send people to, I could take it to a site like:
and use it to generate a QR code that we could stick on our new biz cards:
The old QR code used to point directly to YouTube. The new one points to the permalink on our web site, ensuring that we as a band, and not FB or YouTube, maintains ultimate control over where our users are directed. As such, it future-proofs our biz cards and gives a more branded experience, too:
Everyone doesn’t have a web site sitting around that they can use to solve this problem. For them, one of the redirection services I linked above might get the job done, possibly for a fee. But make sure it offers an “Ignore all parameters”-style feature!
Hope this helps!