Apr 01, 2022 14:00:00

A bug in Facebook's news feed turned out to increase the number of views of 'misinformation and Russian media content'

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To prevent the spread of misinformation and inappropriate content, Facebook has set standards for content delivered to news feeds, and has introduced a system that makes it difficult for problematic content to be displayed in news feeds. However, for six months, it turned out that there was a 'bug that content that should have been demoted was delivered to the news feed', and some inappropriate content was easily visible to users. did.

Facebook News Feed bug mistakenly elevates misinformation, Russian state media --The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/31/23004326/facebook-news-feed-downranking-integrity-bug

To keep the platform healthy, Facebook has introduced a system that makes it difficult for problematic content to flow into the news feed. According to the content distribution guidelines published in September 2021, 'annoying advertisements', 'posts with overly misleading language about content', 'links to websites that unnecessarily request user data', and 'spam' 'Probable' 'Fact-checked false information' 'Posts from untrusted news publishers' 'Contents on the borderline of community guidelines' 'Contents that are likely to violate community guidelines' ' 'Links to landing pages containing sexual and shocking content' etc. will be less likely to be displayed.

Facebook itself explains what posts are less likely to appear in Facebook's news feed-GIGAZINE

However, according to Facebook's internal report obtained by overseas media The Verge, in October 2021, Facebook's engineer group noticed that 'misinformation suddenly began to flow in the news feed.' In this case, the user's posting, which would otherwise be difficult to display, is not suppressed and is delivered to the news feed, saying that 'content that was flagged as incorrect information was repeatedly posted by an external fact checker'. It seems that it has been done. As a result, the number of views of this misinformation content has increased by as much as 30% worldwide.

The engineer group struggled to pinpoint the underlying issue, and an internal report stated that it had repeated news feed issues for half a year until the issue was fixed on March 11, 2022. According to an internal investigation, the content delivered to the news feed by the bug included not only misinformation, but also content such as nudity, violence, and Russian state media.

Joe Osborn, a spokeswoman for Meta, who runs Facebook, acknowledged the bug in a statement to The Verge. 'We detected inconsistencies in ranking demotions on five separate occasions and correlated with a small, temporary increase in internal indicators,' he said.

According to internal documents, the technical issue that caused this bug was introduced in 2019, but the noticeable issue did not occur until October 2021. 'We traced the root cause of the software bug and applied the necessary fixes,' said Osborne, who said the bug had no long-term impact on Facebook's internal metrics and was removed. Added that it had no effect on content that met the threshold.

Sahar Massachi, a former member of Facebook's Civic Integrity team and co-founder of the Integrity Institute , a nonprofit organization that seeks integrity of social sites, admits that bugs are inevitable for large systems. Claims its impact on social platforms as powerful as Facebook. 'We need true transparency to build a sustainable accountability system, which allows us to quickly become aware of these issues,' he said.