For six months, a bug in Facebook’s content-ranking algorithm increased the visibility of content previously flagged by fact-checkers as disinformation. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for detailed public explanations from the US social media mega-company about this bug and its impact.
The flaw’s existence has just been revealed by The Verge, a US tech website that obtained a confidential internal memo about the bug by engineers at Facebook parent company Meta, the content of which is staggering.
Meta’s engineers discovered a “massive ranking failure” that may have increased views of disinformation in Facebook’s News Feed by as much as 30%. The bug may also have promoted nudity, violence, and even Russian state media content. RSF calls on Meta to provide precise explanations about its impact and to publish the relevant data.
According to the report obtained by The Verge, the technical problem dates back from 2019 and began causing a noticeable surge in disinformation in October 2021 and was not fixed until last month. Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne claimed in a tweet that the bug had no “meaningful long-term impact” but provided no evidence to support
— source rsf.org | 06.04.2022