Facebook says it discovered a “massive ranking error” that appeared in its users’ news feeds over a period of six months. These were posts with false information and harmful content. This emerges from an internal company report that is available to the technology portal “The Verge”.

Accordingly, half of all news feed contributions in the past six months were exposed to potential “integrity risks”. However, the error had been in Facebook's ranking algorithm since 2019. The problem was first noticed in October 2021 as a wave of misinformation flowed through the news feed.

Instead of suppressing posts of misinformation that had been verified by the company's network of third-party fact-checkers, the posts were distributed in News Feed, increasing views worldwide by up to 30 percent. Unable to find the cause, Facebook engineers watched the spike subside a few weeks later and then flare up again until the rankings issue was fixed on March 11.

A Facebook spokesman has already officially confirmed the technical problem. The “inconsistencies in downranking” correlated with “temporary increases in internal metrics.” It was a software bug that has now been fixed.

Facebook also states to “Protocol”:

“The Verge greatly exaggerated this error because it ultimately did not have a meaningful, long-term impact on problematic content. Only a very small number of feed content views have ever been affected, as the overwhelming majority of feed posts are not eligible for a downgrade in the first place. Once we discovered the discrepancies, we found the cause and quickly made corrections. Even without the fixes, the many other mechanisms we have in place to prevent users from seeing harmful content—including other downgrades, fact-checking labels, and removal of violative content—remain in effect.”

However, it is still unclear which posts were promoted due to the bug or how many views they received.

Sources: The Verge , Protocol


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