Facebook Marked Legitimate Posts Spam and Removed Them

  • AUTHOR: isbah
  • POSTED ON: March 18, 2020

The false news culture has once again taken a toll amid the coronavirus outbreak. Different companies are designing algorithms to ban the content that comes from inauthentic resources. Facebook was following a similar pattern until the users noticed a glitch. The social media site was also removing genuine posts by labelling them “spam”. 


Source: The Wrap

This was clearly infuriating a lot of people as news articles related to recovery and statistics of coronavirus also got affected. The issue was “due to a bug in an anti-spam system” according to Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity.

The company started working on the issue as soon as they discovered it and Rosen notified the users of the process.

After The Verge reported the incident, Facebook resolved the problem by restoring all the posts taken down due to spam. “We’ve restored all the posts that were incorrectly removed, which included posts on all topics — not just those related to COVID-19,” said Guy Rosen.

Facebook says that the problem occurred due to an automated moderation tool. The tech giant said in January that they would be moderating content related to coronavirus and will remove false information from the site. Just yesterday, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube released a combined statement on how to battle misleading news.

Here are some of the posts that got affected due to spam.


Source: Twitter


Source; Twitter

Source: Twitter


Source: Twitter


Source: Twitter


Source: Twitter

Updated March 18, 2020
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