Facebook error caused false news to display for six months

The Verge citing inside sources Meta that engineers Facebook first realized the problem last October, when misinformation suddenly flooded the News Feed. But instead of blocking these posts, the algorithm accelerated the reach, causing views to skyrocket by up to 30% globally.

However, the engineering team could not find the root cause of the problem. They chose to track the rise and fall of the information and flag it for a long time afterwards. By March 11, the new error was fixed.

In addition to posts that had to be manually flagged, an internal investigation found that during the error, the Facebook system was unable to properly remove infringing content such as nudity or violence. The problem of fake news related to the conflict in Ukraine also appeared more.

“The company discovered a number of inconsistencies regarding the content ranking algorithm on five separate occasions. However, these were all minor and temporary issues,” said Joe Osborne, Meta spokesman, talk to The Verge. “We have found the cause and will apply the necessary fixes.”

According to Osborne, this technical issue first occurred in 2019 but did not make a noticeable impact until October 2021. However, he asserted that the bug did not have much impact on the platform.

For years, Facebook has always advertised Feed – the new name of News Feed – which is strictly controlled by AI, with an algorithm that can lower rankings for sensitive content such as politics, violence. In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg explained that the downgrade would counteract “the urge of each person to engage with sensational and provocative content”.

Bao Lam