Tech

Facebook is wrongly blocking news articles about the coronavirus pandemic

By Rob Price
Zuckerberg
Facebook's chairman and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, at the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany on February 15. Andreas Gebert via Reuters
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Facebook is blocking users from posting some legitimate news articles about the novel coronavirus in what appears to be a bug in its spam filters.

On Tuesday, multiple Facebook users reported on Twitter that they found themselves unable to post articles from certain news outlets including Business Insider, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, and The Times of Israel. It's not clear exactly what had gone wrong, and Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

In the face of the mounting COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook has sent many of its content moderators home, saying it will rely more on automated software instead. Alex Stamos, an outspoken former Facebook security executive, speculated that this shift might be to blame.

"It looks like an anti-spam rule at FB is going haywire," he wrote on Twitter. "Facebook sent home content moderators yesterday, who generally can't WFH" — work from home — "due to privacy commitments the company has made. We might be seeing the start of the ML" — machine learning — "going nuts with less human oversight."

Facebook, however, denied that the bug was related to any changes to its content-moderator workforce.

"We're on this - this is a bug in an anti-spam system, unrelated to any changes in our content moderator workforce," the company's vice president of integrity, Guy Rosen, tweeted. "We're in the process of fixing and bringing all these posts back."

Here are some of the complaints:

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Reporter Rob Price sitting at a table
Rob Price
Rob Price was a senior correspondent at Business Insider, based in San Francisco. He wrote investigations and long-form features about platforms, people, and power in Silicon Valley.His stories variously led to attorney general investigations, large-scale internal reviews at major tech companies, high-profile personnel departures, citation by state and federal lawmakers, and the closure of a well-funded startup. His 2022 story on the Bitfinex hack is being adapted into a feature film, and in 2024 he received an SPJ NorCal Excellence in Journalism award for his reporting on AI and relationships.Rob's scoops and exclusive stories were cited by The New York Times, Bloomberg, the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, CNBC, Politico, The Guardian, Axios, and many other national and international publications. His writing has also been published in or syndicated by The Washington Post, The Independent, Vice, Slate, and elsewhere, and he appeared on CNN, the BBC, CBS, Reuters, ABC Australia, and other broadcast media to discuss technology, business, and culture.He worked for Business Insider from 2015 to 2025. Prior to joining the features team, Rob covered Facebook and Silicon Valley, and before that wrote about tech business, policy, and the gig economy in London. Between September and October 2019, he was acting executive editor for Business Insider's UK bureau. He also sat on the board of directors for the San Francisco Press Club, the leading non-profit media advocacy group in the Bay Area, and was a volunteer crew member at the Marine Mammal Center, the world's largest animal hospital for marine mammals. You can contact Rob Price via email at robaeprice@gmail.com, or +1 650-636-6268 (Signal / WhatsApp / Cell). Selected stories:— They spoke out against their employer. Then they were hit with trade secrets suits.— The rise of 'shadow stand-ins'— App, Lover, Muse: Inside a 47-year-old Minnesota man's three-year relationship with an AI chatbot— Deel Speed: The inside story of a $12 billion HR startup's breakneck growth— Private islands, flying cars, and psychedelic parties: Inside the wild post-Google lives of Larry Page and Sergey Brin— 'I want your Instagram account': First came the threatening texts, followed by the SWAT teams. Then someone wound up dead.— Inside Iconiq: How Mark Zuckerberg's banker built a secret Silicon Valley empire and made billions— Gaia was a wildly popular yoga brand. Now it's a publicly traded Netflix rival pushing conspiracy theories while employees fear the CEO is invading their dreams— A drunken late-night assault allegation has roiled the secretive world of Mark Zuckerberg's private family office. Personal aides are speaking out about claims that household staff endured sexual harassment and racism from their colleagues.
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