Facebook blocked stories of its breach as spam: Details here
Soon after revealing details of the massive breach it suffered, Facebook blocked people from posting stories related to it. Many Facebook users took to Twitter to report that the social media giant was removing the breaking news by flagging it as spam content. The blocked stories, as the users said, were mainly those from The Guardian and the Associated Press. Here are the details.
Content removed by Facebook's automated tools
As Facebook made the shocking revelation, the internet was flooded with stories related to the same, including the ones from The Guardian and AP. The two stories, specifically, were widely shared at the same time, prompting Facebook's security system to treat them as spam content. Facebook uses automated content flagging tools instead of human moderators and that is probably why the stories were quashed.
This was Facebook's error message
Facebook's immediate fix, confirmation
Following several reports, many media outlets were able to replicate the problem and draw Facebook's attention to it. The company immediately issued a fix for the bug, making sure the stories are not removed on being posted. It even confirmed the same on Twitter. That said, it still remains unclear why other stories going viral at the same speed weren't removed from the platform.
This isn't the first case of legitimate content flagging
While Facebook already has too many problems, including the latest security breach, to deal with, it is important to note this isn't the first messed-up case of content flagging. The automatic content moderating tools used by the social media giant has flagged legitimate content as illegitimate on several occasions as well as failed to prevent hate speech.
