Since that night, the news wires of many users are invaded by unsolicited messages.
Le Monde
The functioning of Facebook is strongly disrupted, Wednesday, August 24, by a bug which seems to reach very many Internet users around the world. The news feed for social network users is invaded by messages in all languages, often short, emanating from unknown people.
The main common point of these messages seems to be that they are addressed to celebrity accounts; They appear mainly on the sons of people who follow these personalities on Facebook, generating a certain chaos. The problem seems to concern only Facebook; Instagram, also property of Meta, is not affected.
These disturbances have all the appearances of a bug affecting the system of classification of messages of the news wire of the social network. For ten years, Facebook has been using an algorithm that has attributed a “note” to each content published on the platform, and selects what is displayed in the news feed according to its alleged interest and the interests of each user. A potential track is that this bug overcomes the “note” of messages addressed to public figures. Solicited by Le Monde, Facebook says it is “aware of the fact that some people encounter problems on their topical sons. We are working on a return to normal as fast as possible, and we are sorry for the inconvenience caused”.
In the meantime, Internet users use the phenomenon to broadcast much memes and satirical messages making fun of Facebook by sending their messages to celebrity pages to ensure their wide dissemination.
Ultra -supplexed classification algorithms
The operation of Facebook content classification algorithms, which have evolved over time to include hundreds of parameters, is particularly complex. The internal Facebook documents made public at the end of 2011 by Frances Haugen, former employee of the social network who became a whistleblower and who denounced “drifts” in the operation of the company, showed that sometimes harmless modifications of Facebook tools could have Unforeseen and major consequences.
“The different parts of Facebook applications interact with each other in a complex way” and each team develops modifications without there being a “unified systemic vision”, noted for example, in one of the documents made public , an employee of the company. With the consequence “an increased risk of problems facilitated or amplified by unforeseen interactions between functions or services of the platform”.