Bug in Facebook’s Anti-Spam Filter Allegedly Blocked Legitimate Posts about COVID-19

March 17, 2020

Facebook users reported incidents of legitimate news about the coronavirus pandemic being blocked, allegedly due to a bug in an anti-spam system. This underscores the need for safe and secure AI practices. For those interested in shaping responsible AI governance and contributing to harm prevention efforts through HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern), this incident serves as a clear example of why guardrails for AI are crucial.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.665, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.647, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.634, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

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.