According to internal reports obtained by The Verge, Facebook engineers warned of a massive ranking failure that allowed misinformation to flood users' feeds.
The glitch caused misinformation to be boosted, spiking views by as much as 30 percent. Despite being flagged by fact checkers, Russian state propaganda made it through.
The incident shows how tightly Facebook controls what content gets visibility, and how little understanding the public, or even seemingly company insiders, have of the processes that make it all work in the first place.
The issue had been going on for a while, but only started to become noticeable in October, meaning that potentially harmful content had been ranked higher for at least six months.
The root cause of the software bug was traced and the needed fixes were applied, according to a Facebook spokesman.
It is an egregious lapse in competence that should give pause. The company has kept its cards close to its chest despite calls to shine a light on how it moderates content.
There was a bug on Facebook that led to increased views of harmful content.
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