Incident #197·Misinformation

Facebook Internally Reported Failure of Ranking Algorithm, Exposing Harmful Content to Viewers over Months

October 1, 20214 reportsView on AIID

Description

Facebook's internal report showed an at-least six-month long alleged software bug that caused moderator-flagged posts and other harmful content to evade down-ranking filters, leading to surges of misinformation on users' News Feed.

Actors

Alleged Deployers

facebook

Alleged Developers

facebook

Harmed Parties

facebook-users

Classification

Risk Domain

Misinformation

Risk Subdomain

3.1. False or misleading information

MIT Risk Profile

AIUnintentionalPost-deployment

Source

Databaseaiid

LicenseCC BY-SA 4.0

View on AIID

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Research Papers on This Topic

Fast-DetectGPT: Efficient Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text via Conditional Probability Curvature

450 citationsOct 2023

Why Language Models Hallucinate

371 citationsSep 2025

CIFAKE: Image Classification and Explainable Identification of AI-Generated Synthetic Images

283 citationsMar 2023

Degenerate Feedback Loops in Recommender Systems

265 citationsFeb 2019

Source Reports(4 total)

Meta admits Facebook bug led to a 'surge of misinformation'

dailymail.co.uk· Apr 2022

Facebook system designed to smother harmful misinformation actually spread it

thedrum.com· Apr 2022