Amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, Facebook was one of the tech giants that pledged to fight misinformation and misreporting yesterday. However, it seems that one of the filters instated had some pretty unexpected results. Specifically, the anti-spam filter mistakenly flagged a non-spam article from the Times of Israel on fighting misinformation as spam.
It looks like an anti-spam rule at FB is going haywire. Facebook sent home content moderators yesterday, who generally can"t WFH due to privacy commitments the company has made. We might be seeing the start of the ML going nuts with less human oversight. https://t.co/XCSz405wtR
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) March 17, 2020
This was not the only case. Quite a few others complained that their posts had been removed with a notice that "This post goes against our Community Standards on spam". Vice President of Integrity at Facebook, Guy Rosen, tweeted in response that this was caused by a bug in an anti-spam system. He also clarified that it was not related to Facebook"s content moderator workforce, which a few people were speculating to be responsible.
Guy later tweeted that the bug was in an automated system that removed links to abusive sites and that it affected posts on all topics, not just those apropos COVID-19. All wrongly removed posts were restored.