Facebook has been among the biggest names when it comes to the world of technology. For the past several years the company has been the apex name in the world of social media as well as advertising. Recent news reports that a Facebook Bug caused a major unwanted incident - profile information of the Facebook content moderators was leaked to potential terrorist groups. This bug came to light in late 2016, and details about this incident have emerged now.
Basically, when the Facebook content moderators came across any post that promoted violence or sexually explicit content, they delete it. However, normally you will never know who was the person from Facebook who took the action. In late 2016, due to this Facebook bug, the name of these content moderators began appearing in the admin activity log in the groups. This allows other moderators and group administrators to see who did it. This was a serious risk to the personal security of these people.
What made matters even sensitive was the fact that while there were nearly a 1000 individuals affected by this bug, 40 of them were based out of Facebook’s counter terrorism department in Israel. There is a major chance that potential terrorists have seen their profiles and know who they are. The Guardian reports that Facebook has since ensured that such a thing does not happen ever again. The Facebook bug was fixed in November last year.
However, while Facebook assures that this bug has been fixed, those working on the content moderation teams are not so sure. One of the team members told the guardian that the terrorists who he banned from Facebook know who he is. The moderator decided to quit his job and went into hiding. Him, as well as others first noticed this Facebook bug when they began getting friend requests from people in these suspect terror groups.
It took Facebook about two weeks to fix this bug, and reportedly information going back till admin actions taken as far as August 2016 was exposed. Stay tuned with us for more updates on the story.
