Facebook is wrongly blocking some links, including coronavirus info

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/17/facebook-link-spam-filter-coronavirus/

Josh Constine@joshconstine / 7:25 pm EDT • March 17, 2020

Facebook is suffering from a massive bug in its News Feed spam filter, causing URLs to legitimate websites including Medium, Buzzfeed, and USA Today to be blocked from being shared as posts or comments. The issue is blocking shares of some but not all coronavirus-related content, while some unrelated links are allowed through and others are not. It’s not clear what exactly is or isn’t tripping the filter. Facebook has been trying to fight back against misinformation related to the outbreak, but may have gotten overzealous or experienced a technical error.

A source tipped us off and provided numerous examples of blocked links. We reached out to Facebook for comment and a company spokesperson told us “We’re looking into this right now and working as quickly as possible to share information. [I] can confirm at this point that we’re looking into the matter, can’t confirm what might be happening just yet.”

Facebook’s Guy Rosen later tweeted that “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.” Facebook sent home its content moderators this week and announced it would be relying more on its artificial intelligence systems, warning it could make “more mistakes”.

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https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/17/21184445/facebook-marking-coronavirus-posts-spam-misinformation-covid-19?fbclid=IwAR3RWu-MaGUUka8uaEfjRyCDjHivzmu5LEP_K1dHCQ2lw21Iqq3JuFhD1Zg

By Jay Peters@jaypeters Mar 17, 2020, 7:29pm EDT

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Following publication of The Verge’s report, Rosen said Facebook ahd resolved th issue and restored the affected posts. “We’ve restored all the posts that were incorrectly removed, which included posts on all topics — not just those related to COVID-19,” Rosen explained. According to Facebook, the issue was with an automated moderation tool and was not related to any changes to its moderator workforce.

The company previously announced that it would remove false claims and conspiracy theories about coronavirus in January. Facebook also joined Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube in publishing a joint statement yesterday committing to fighting coronavirus-related fraud and misinformation.

A new report published by Ranking Digital Rights argued on Tuesday that Facebook’s current approach to moderation may not be able to address the issue of coronavirus-related misinformation on its platform.

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