Facebook's Content Moderation System Flagged and Removed Emergency Updates as Spam During Wildfires
June 1, 2024
Facebook's AI moderation system wrongly flagged and removed dozens of posts containing vital emergency information during California's wildfire season, including real-time updates on evacuations and fire tracking. Posts from official sources like Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service were marked as spam, potentially endangering lives by restricting access to crucial updates. Despite user complaints, the issue persisted, with Facebook acknowledging the problem only after media inquiry.
- Alleged deployer
- meta, facebook
- Alleged developer
- meta, facebook
- Alleged harmed parties
- california-residents, wildfire-evacuees, emergency-responders, disaster-relief-workers, fire-safety-coordinators, facebook-users, facebook-users-in-disaster-zones
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/796
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.