Facebook and other social media platforms have been working hard to fix the bugs and delete posts related to coronavirus that may not be completely accurate.
A Facebook user told John Koetsier, a Forbes journalist and author, “Facebook is blocking COVID-19 posts from fact-based sources. Facebook is hiding these posts. At the time of viral pandemic, this shouldn’t be happening.”
Along with Facebook, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Twitter and Reddit have issued a joint statement on curbing coronavirus misinformation that is circulating on their platforms.
Koetsier says it is a good thing, as long as they are targeting information that is incorrect and misleading.
Multiple other sites have also experienced the same thing, such as Medium, Buzzfeed, USA Today, Stuff, The Independent, The New York Post and The Dallas Morning.
Misleading information on Facebook has led to many conspiracy theories.
Another Facebook friend told Koetsier, “Facebook is going hard on information control, I guess Facebook wants us all to be misinformed and die.”
Facebook executive Guy Rosen said there was a bug in their system that is designed to stop spam.
“We’re on this – this is a bug in an anti-spam system, unrelated to any changes in our content moderator workforce. We’re in the process of fixing and bringing all these posts back. More soon,” Rosen tweeted.
However, a few hours later, Rosen tweeted that the problem was fixed.
He wrote, “We’ve restored all the posts that were incorrectly removed, which included posts on all topics – not just those related to COVID-19. This was an issue with an automated system that removes links to abusive websites, but incorrectly removed a lot of other posts too.”
Koetsier said the same Facebook friend who alerted him about the problem in the first place checked her deleted posts and was still getting messages about deleted posts. The article was published online by Koetsier on Forbes.
