Facebook downranking system failure leads to misinformation spike

Facebook experienced a 'massive' failure of its content ranking system that exposed users to a surge of disinformation, hate speech and other harmful content.

According an internal report obtained by The Verge, the failure was caused by a software bug that exposed as much as half of all News Feed views to potential “integrity risks” over six months, with posts that would usually have been demoted by the company's algorithms boosted by as much as 30 percent. 

According to the document, Facebook engineers had first noticed the issue, which was later attributed to a software bug, when a sudden surge of disinformation, hate speech, and other harmful content began flowing through the News Feed. 

A Facebook spokesman told The Verge the bug 'has not had any meaningful, long-term impact on our metrics.'