Facebook reportedly blocked users stories related to its data breach
Facebook reportedly blocked users from posting certain stories related to its security breach. According to TechCrunch, some users reported that were unable to post about a security affecting 50 million Facebook users on the social media platform.
The report claims the issue seems to have affected stories from certain outlets including The Guardian, Associated Press, and TechCrunch as well. The site mentioned that while trying to share stories about the Facebook breach to their news feed, an error message pop-up that prevented them from sharing it in the platform. TechCrunch noted that Facebook was flagging the stories as spam because of the wide share of the message. As per the screenshot shared by TechCrunch, the security systems on Facebook detected the message to be spam since “a lot of people” posted the same content. While this seems inappropriate, recent reports indicated that the unfortunate error occurred due to Facebook’s automated spam filters.
TechCrunch reports that this isn’t the first such bug occurred on Facebook. The platform’s automated tools which operate at ‘unprecedented scale’ are known for censoring legitimate posts but failing to detect harassment and hate speech, the report mentioned. However, Facebook reportedly clarified that the issue was related to automated moderation system. The bug that appeared to have been resolved, Facebook said via Twitter.
“Following up – people should be able to share both articles now. Sorry for the inconvenience,” the tweet read.
Facebook is already under deep scrutiny after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and it is now trying to resolve a major security breach that exposed the account of 50 million Facebook users. The company mentioned that the users’ data were at risk after miscreants exploited a vulnerability that gave them the access to personal data. As per a report, Facebook’s CEO said that the ‘attackers’ used the platform’s developer APIs to gather information like name, gender etc that are linked to a user’s profile. Apparently, the vulnerability cropped up on the site in July 2017. Facebook is still ‘facing questions’ regarding data revelations in Cambridge Analytica. And while Facebook has said that it fixed the recent data breach vulnerability, the question remains as to how much secured the platform is to share the user’s personal data.