Facebook Blocks Bad News About Itself as ‘Spam’

Facebook has blocked users from posting articles from the Guardian the AP about the social media platform’s latest user data breach, marking them as “spam.” The company later reversed decision, which it called an “error.”

The link blocking was first noticed by Shaun Hair, executive editor of the Western Journal, who posted a video of his attempt to post an article from the Guardian about Facebook’s latest data breach to his Facebook page. In the video, Hair pastes a link to the video and receives an error telling him that the link is spam and cannot be posted.

Watch @Facebook tell me the Guardian article link that busts them on a privacy breach is spam. pic.twitter.com/xJvodmGUqj

— Shaun Hair (@shaunhair) September 28, 2018

Breitbart News attempted to recreate this error and received the exact same message, which reads “Our security systems have detected that a lot of people are posting the same content, which could mean that it’s spam. Please try a different post.”

A screenshot of the error can be seen below:

It was later reported that an article by the Associated Press about the same topic was also being blocked from being posted to Facebook:

just tried to post the @AP version of the story on my wall and @facebook blocked it pic.twitter.com/kLycwax6Jm

— Manuel Ramos (@Ramos_Manuel45) September 28, 2018

After this article originally published, Facebook provided the following statement to Breitbart News:

“Our automated systems incorrectly marked two news articles – one from The Guardian and another from the AP – as spam. We fixed the issue as soon as we were made aware of it, and people should be able to share both articles. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Update — A statement from Facebook has been added to this article.