Facebook News Feed (News Feed) has been pushing “bad” content for the past six months due to a major sorting error. Due to loopholes in the sorting algorithm, dynamic messages increase the weight of false and violent information.
In October of last year, engineers discovered that there was a problem with the push when false information in the News Feed increased significantly. False information is supposed to be vetted by fact-checkers and should have been suppressed early, but it spreads everywhere.
The engineer couldn’t find the root cause, and could only watch the false information continue to ferment, subsided after a few weeks, and then relapse. Finally, the engineer found that there was a problem with the sorting, and fixed it on March 11.
Internal documents show that the technical issue dates back to as early as 2019, but it didn’t have a major impact until October 2021. Meta spokesman Joe Osborne said: “We tracked down the root cause, found a bug in the software, and fixed it. The bug does not have any meaningful long-term impact on our assessment criteria.”
For years, Facebook has touted the company’s descending order system, arguing that it could improve the quality of its News Feed and that it could handle a wider variety of content in the future as the automated system is optimized. Clearly, the Facebook system is still not perfect.