Facebook Marks Articles About Data Breach As “Spam” on Facebook
Peter D'Abrosca
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After a Friday data breach that resulted in 50 million compromised accounts, a Silicon Valley tech giant marked articles reporting on the breach as “spam” on its own platform.
“Facebook has blocked users from posting articles from the Guardian the AP about the social media platform’s latest user data breach, marking them as ‘spam.’ The company later reversed decision, which it called an ‘error,’” according to Breitbart.
Shaun Hair, executive editor of the Western Journal, first noticed the Facebook scam, and reported it on his Twitter account:
“Watch @Facebook tell me the Guardian article link that busts them on a privacy breach is spam,” he said with an accompanying video.
https://twitter.com/shaunhair/status/1045761354982776832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1045761354982776832&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Ftech%2F2018%2F09%2F28%2Ffacebook-blocks-bad-news-about-itself-as-spam%2F
When Breitbart recreated the scenario by trying to post the same article, they received the same error message as Hair.
“Our security systems have detected that a lot of people are posting the same content, which could mean that it’s spam. Please try a different post,” the error message said.
A Twitter user name Manuel Ramos received a similar message when trying to post an article about the data breach written by AP.
“just tried to post the @AP version of the story on my wall and @facebook blocked it,” he said, attaching a photo of the error message.
https://twitter.com/Ramos_Manuel45/status/1045769589550911490?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1045769589550911490&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Ftech%2F2018%2F09%2F28%2Ffacebook-blocks-bad-news-about-itself-as-spam%2F
Facebook brushed off the incident as an innocent mistake in a statement:
“Our automated systems incorrectly marked two news articles – one from The Guardian and another from the AP – as spam. We fixed the issue as soon as we were made aware of it, and people should be able to share both articles. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
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