Facebook’s VP of Integrity said that the system was supposed to remove links to abusive websites, but removed many others as well.
Several legitimate posts, particularly pertaining to COVID-19, were taken down by Facebook, prompting outrage and questions over what the social media giant was doing. Aimed at curtailing the spread of fake and mischievous health information around COVID-19, Facebook's News Feed spam filter blocked URLs of legitimate websites. Guy Rosen, vice president of product management at Facebook replied: "We're on this - this is a bug in an anti-spam system, unrelated to any changes in our content moderator workforce. We're in the process of fixing and bringing all these posts back". "It looks like an anti-spam rule at FB is going haywire. Facebook sent home content moderators yesterday, who generally can't WFH (work from home) due to privacy commitments the company has made. We might be seeing the start of the ML [machine learning] going nuts with less human oversight," tweeted Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer at Facebook. “We're on this - this is a bug in an anti-spam system, unrelated to any changes in our content moderator workforce. We're in the process of fixing and bringing all these posts back. More soon,” Rosen, who is also the vice president of integrity at Facebook, said. Over an hour later, he said that Facebook had restored all posts it incorrectly removed. “We’ve restored all the posts that were incorrectly removed, which included posts on all topics - not just those related to COVID-19. This was an issue with an automated system that removes links to abusive websites, but incorrectly removed a lot of other posts too,” he said. A Twitter user posted: "It's not just news articles. A community flier asking for emergency donations of food to the needy in our community was blocked. A friend in Canada had posts from Royal Canadian Mounted Police blocked. It's very widespread". Top tech giants Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube have come together to help fight the fake news and misinformation related to COVID-19 on their platforms. Facebook and Instagram have already announced to ban ads and commerce listings selling medical face masks on their platforms to stop people from exploiting the coronavirus emergency. Facebook said that coronavirus-related searches on its platform would be greeted with an automatic pop-up featuring information from the WHO. With inputs from IANS
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