Facebook Revealed Massive Bug
Alison Anderson
06 Apr 2022
he meta-owned social network has shared the news on the huge bug that revealed unwanted content in the feeds. The bug became a big internal problem for all employees. There was a ranking failure in the massive scale of the content.
The content that previously was found problematic and misleading became prioritized in the feed of Facebook users. The bug was connected to the software, and it took almost 6 months to get rid of it. At first, the company did not even pay attention to the problem. Joe Osborne, the main spokesperson of Meta, said that the Facebook team underestimated it, believing it is a meaningless and random mistake. They thought there will be no impact on the content.
Meanwhile, the bug became a serious threat when it came to the inside investigation of the problem. A Group of employees reported that there is a massive failure in ranking content. Back in October 2021 Facebook team noticed the questionable content being pushed above other information in the feed. It was already put aside by a third-party program that works with Facebook on fact-checking. Since the content was identified as unreliable, the working algorithm had to put it aside. Developers began to investigate the problem, trying to find the cause of it. However, they were unable to get to the root. Only on March 11 did they manage to deal with the bug for good.
The vast majority of accounts on Facebook did not even notice the problem, according to Osborne. He says that not many posts on Facebook have the option to get down-ranked. The harmful content was pushed aside and remained in its place since users still could label it as a violation. The fact-checking algorithm works in 80 countries on Facebook.
Have you ever seen such content on Facebook? Do you read news from the feed? Share your thoughts about it in the comments below.