Facebook News Feed bug reportedly promoted misinformation and other inappropriate posts to its users for several months, a recent report unveils.
This photograph taken on November 5, 2021, shows the logo of US online social media and social networking service Facebook on a laptop screen in Moscow.
Facebook News Feed Bug
As per a news story by Business Insider, a bug on the News Feed feature of the social media giant has been helping in the campaign of spreading misinformation on the platform due to its software bug.
An internal report obtained by the news outlet The Verge claimed that the engineers at Facebook discovered that there is a "massive ranking failure" in the software of its News Feed, where users see the posts of pages and other users in an algorithm-determined order.
However, the bug on News Feed reportedly massively prioritized misinformation, violence, and nudity to the accounts of its users.
On top of that, the media outlet further noted that the ranking issue on the News Feed also failed to demote posts from the state media of Russia.
Facebook News Feed Bug Discovery
According to a recent report by The Verge, the engineers of Facebook noticed the issue in the News Feed last October 2021, wherein misinformation content began to flood it.
In turn, even if the posts have already been flagged by the independent fact-checkers of the social media network as misinformation, the Facebook News Feed allegedly continued to boost its views.
To be more precise, these harmful contents are said to have even increased its views by a huge 30 percent around the world.
The Facebook engineers have yet to understand the root cause of the problem during their discovery. So, they decided to wait for the surge of harmful content on the platform for a couple of weeks.
A person holds an iPhone displaying the Facebook app logo in front of a computer screen showing the facebook login page on August 3, 2016 in London, England.
However, even after it appears to have subsided, the mess on the News Feed allegedly continues, which repeatedly surged in spreading harmful content to its users.
After half a year has already passed, The Verge said in the same report that Facebook has already fixed the ranking mess on its News Feed on March 11.
Facebook Parent Meta's Response
The spokesperson of the parent firm of Facebook, Meta, Joe Osborne, has already confirmed the ranking issue on its News Feed.
The Meta spokesperson said that Facebook has "detected inconsistencies in downranking on five separate occasions," but he said that it "has not had any meaningful, long-term impact on our metrics."
Osborne also assured that the issues had already been fixed.
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Written by Teejay Boris
