Facebook has blocked 400,000 posts falsely flagged as TERRORISM

Facebook has admitted it wrongly flagged 400,000 posts as terrorist and removed them from its platform.

The US social media giant said on Tuesday that the glitch was due to a bug that caused its moderation algorithms to mislabel content.

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Meta, the company that owns Facebook, shared the bug in its quarterly community standards enforcement report.

It was forced to restore a total of 414,000 jobs wrongfully removed for violations of terrorism-related policies.

Another 232,000 were classified because they were wrongly considered to be linked to organized hate groups.

Apparently the posts were blocked due to the same bug. The problem has now been resolved.

In its report, Meta said it nearly doubled the amount of violent content it removes from Facebook.

In the first quarter of 2022, Meta removed 21.7 million posts for violating its violent content rules.

That’s up from 12.4 million in the previous quarter.

There was also an increase in the amount of spam and drug-related content being removed from Facebook and Instagram, respectively.

However, Meta said the prevalence of harmful content has decreased slightly in some areas, including bullying and harassment content.

This is due to improvements and enhancements to the company’s proactive detection technology.

“Over the years, we’ve invested in developing technologies to improve the way we can detect infringing content,” said Guy Rosen, Meta’s vice president of integrity.

“As we make this progress, we know we’re going to make mistakes, so it’s been equally important to invest in refining our policies, our enforcement, and the tools we make available to users along the way.”

Mr. Rosen also said the company stands ready to refine the guidelines as needed as new content regulations for the technology sector are introduced.

The UK’s Online Safety Bill is currently going through Parliament and would introduce tough new content rules on online harm for platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

The EU is also working on its own regulation, and a similar approach is expected in the USA in the future.

“As new regulations continue to be introduced around the world, we are focused on the obligations they create for us,” said Mr. Rosen.

“So we add and refine processes and oversee many areas of our work.

“This will allow us to make continued progress on social issues while meeting our regulatory obligations more effectively.”

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