Incident 317: Bug in Facebook’s Anti-Spam Filter Allegedly Blocked Legitimate Posts about COVID-19

Description: Facebook was reported by users for blocking posts of legitimate news about the coronavirus pandemic, allegedly due to a bug in an anti-spam system.

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Alleged: Facebook developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Facebook users posting legitimate COVID-19 news and Facebook users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
317
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2020-03-17
Editors
Khoa Lam

Incident Reports

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.