Facebook mistakenly deleted coronavirus-related posts due to a bug

At a time when topics like 'Coronavirus' and 'Covid-19' are gaining a lot of traction on social media, it has become more than important for media giants to inform users about it and keep them up to date with latest news. But it looks like Facebook had its 'oops' moment recently wherein a bug marked coronavirus-related information from prominent news organisations as a spam. The bug didn't allow users to share some of the posts and even hid few of them.

In the screenshot shared by TechCrunch, the disclaimer by Facebook over the posts made by news organisations showed messages like "No one else can see your post. We have these standards to prevent things like false advertising, fraud and security breaches" under the "Your post goes against our Community Standards on spam" banner.

Also read: Facebook, Microsoft, Google team up against coronavirus misinformation

At that time, Facebook spokesperson replied "We're looking into this right now and working as quickly as possible to share information. [I] can confirm at this point that we're looking into the matter, can't confirm what might be happening just yet." Facebook's vice president of product, Guy Rosen gave some more details with a Twitter post.  

However, the posts were later restored that were incorrectly removed with the Facebook bug. "This was an issue with an automated system that removes links to abusive websites, but incorrectly removed a lot of other posts too," Rosen later tweeted. The company spokesperson later confirmed that the issue was not because Facebook recently asked content moderators to work from home due to the coronavirus outbreak.