Facebook Algorithm Goes Haywire, Blocking Random Posts And Marking Them As Spam

Facebook’s algorithms just caught a cold, marking various posts, including them from news agencies, as spam. Yes, it's true! It was brought to light by Salena Zito, a post columnist at New York Post, whose article ‘ Why Trump’s supporters won’t care about Cohen and Manafort’s convictions’ was removed from the social media platform and was labelled as ‘violating community standards’. To which the columnist tweeted, “So this is interesting … @facebook took down my post of my reporting for the @nypost — I’ve received nine separate messages from readers telling me the same thing has happened to them. ‘sup @facebook?”.

Also, another article shared by India Today ‘Higher GDP growth during the Manmohan era’ on Facebook was also marked as spam. Whereas, the social media giant has taken down many Kerala volunteer-run flood relief pages. As per reports from Livemint states that Kerala Flood Disaster Urgent Help - a page designed to cater donations to the flood-affected areas in Kerala was also taken down and labelled as spam. Ahead of US General Elections Facebook Rolled Out a New Tool that Lets Journalists Scrutinise Political Ads.

Now, a news website The Daily Caller addressed the issue to Facebook, to which the company’s spokesperson said, “An error affected our automated systems today, which meant that some posts were incorrectly marked as spam. We’ve identified the issue and worked to fix it. We apologize to everyone who’s been affected”. Hopefully, we can expect the affected post to be visible again.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 24, 2018 03:05 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).