Facebook's Alleged Anti-Spam Bug: Impacts on COVID-19 Information Sharing - Harm Prevention through Responsible AI

March 17, 2020

Recent reports claim that Facebook blocked legitimate posts about the coronavirus pandemic, potentially due to a bug in its anti-spam system. This incident highlights the need for safe and secure AI, particularly in the context of crucial information dissemination during emergencies. This AI incident maps to the Govern function in HISPI Project Cerebellum Trusted AI Model (TAIM). Are you ready to help shape responsible AI? JOIN US
Alleged deployer
facebook
Alleged developer
facebook
Alleged harmed parties
facebook-users-posting-legitimate-covid-19-news, facebook-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/317

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.