Ahead of the 2020 US Presidential elections, social media giant Facebook took steps to combat misinformation. However, those steps weren’t enough to stop the spread of misinformation.

Due to data disclosed by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who testified before Congress, the Mark Zuckerberg- led tech major is under heightened scrutiny for issues of radicalisation and other dangerous information on the platform.

A “bug” in Facebook’s News Feed ranking algorithm injected a “rush of misinformation” and other dangerous content into users’ News Feeds between October and March,
according to an internal letter obtained by The Verge.

Facebook engineers discovered a “massive ranking failure” on its News Feed that disproportionately distributed posts including nudity, violence, and misleading information as determined by independent third-party fact-checkers, the report said.

Rather than censoring posts from repeat disinformation offenders that were evaluated by the company’s network of outside fact-checkers, the News Feed distributed them, increasing views by up to 30% internationally.

The glitch affects Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, which is designed to downrank debunked disinformation and other problematic and “borderline” contents.

“During the bug period, Facebook’s systems failed to properly demote nudity, violence, and even Russian state media the social network recently pledged to stop recommending in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine,” according to the report.

What’s concerning is the fact that Facebook engineers noticed something was really wrong — the bug was classified as a “severe” vulnerability in October, according to The Verge — but it was not patched until March 11th because engineers could not identify the root cause.

Instagram’s non-algorithmic feed was recently reintroduced, partly in response to concerns about the influence of its suggestions on younger users.

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