Some users are reporting that they are unable to post today\u2019s big story about a security breach affecting 50 million Facebook users. The issue appears to only affect particular stories from certain outlets, at this time one story from The Guardian and one from the Associated Press, both reput\u2026<\/b>
\nSome users are reporting that they are unable to post today\u2019s big story about a security breach affecting 50 million Facebook users. The issue appears to only affect particular stories from certain outlets, at this time one story from The Guardian and one from the Associated Press, both reputable press outlets.
When going to share the story to their news feed, some users, including members of the staff here at TechCrunch who were able to replicate the bug, were met with the following error message which prevented them from sharing the story.
According to the message, Facebook is flagging the stories as spam due to how widely they are being shared or as the message puts it, the system\u2019s observation that \u201ca lot of people are posting the same content.\u201d
To be clear, this isn\u2019t one Facebook content moderator sitting behind a screen rejecting the link somewhere or the company conspiring against users spreading damning news. The situation is another example of Facebook\u2019s automated content flagging tools marking legitimate content as illegitimate, in this case calling it spam. Still, it\u2019s strange and difficult to understand why such a bug wouldn\u2019t affect many other stories that regularly go viral on the social platform.
This instance is by no means a first for Facebook. The platform\u2019s automated tools \u2014 which operate at unprecedented scale for a social network \u2014 are well known for at times censoring legitimate posts and flagging benign content while failing to detect harassment and hate speech. We\u2019ve reached out to Facebook for details about how this kind of thing happens but the company appears to have its hands full with the bigger news of the day.
While the incident is nothing particularly new, it\u2019s an odd quirk \u2014 and in this instance quite a bad look given that the bad news affects Facebook itself.<\/p>\n

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