The coronavirus outbreak is affecting all aspects of our lives. While all social networks have joined forces to combat misinformation and the spread of fake news about the virus, a bug on Facebook has been flagging some articles about the coronavirus as spam, as reported by some users on Twitter.
The bug, which was found in the News Feed spam filter, marked URLs of some major websites like USA Today, Medium, and Buzzfeed as spam. According to the tweets, in addition to coronavirus-related content, general content on the websites was also marked as spam.
According to Facebook Vice President Guy Rosen, a bug found in Facebook's anti-spam system is causing the problem. He added that the company has already started working to fix the bug.
A few hours after the bug was discovered, Facebook managed to fix it and restore the articles that were flagged. As reported by Rosen, Facebook has restored all erroneously removed posts related to COVID-19 or any other general topic.
A report by Ranking Digital Rights argues that Facebook's policies are not effective in combating the spread of fake news and misinformation. It is crucial that the social network changes its moderation policies so that it can help combat false information about the spread of the virus.
Recently, in a joint statement, Facebook, along with tech giants such as Reddit, Twitter, Microsoft, Google and LinkedIn, said they would fight against misinformation about the coronavirus.
Some of the users stated that the error is most likely due to Facebook's new moderation policies.
