Why Facebook wrongly blocked legitimate posts on COVID-19

Facebook users have observed that some posts of legitimate news outlets about the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) were flagged as spam on Wednesday morning.

According to Shai Lagarde's Wednesday report on Stand for Truth, the incident happened a day after big social media sites released a statement on working together to fight misinformation on the virus.

A former chief officer of Facebook said this may have been caused by the lack of manpower for the platform's content after its personnel was sent to work from home amid the COVID-19 threat.

"Facebook sent home content moderators yesterday, who generally can't WFH due to privacy commitments the company has made. We might be seeing the start of the ML going nuts with less human oversight," Alex Stamos said.

However, Facebook's Vice President for Integrity said the errors have been fixed.

"We've restored all the posts that were incorrectly removed, which included posts on all topics -- not just related to COVID-19," Guy Rosen said.

"This was an issue with an automated system that removes links to abusive websites, but incorrectly removed a lot of other posts too," he added.

However, some replies to Rosen's statement claimed that some posts were still not restored.

Watch the video to know more. —Joahna Lei Casilao/LDF, GMA News