Facebook allegedly stopping people from sharing stories about its data breach

tech2 News Staff Sep 29, 2018 13:19 PM IST

In what could be termed as yet another embarrassment for the social media giant, Facebook reported that nearly 50 million users' personal data had been compromised due to a vulnerability in one of its features and this number could apparently go up to 90 million. What's more embarrassing is the fact that Facebook could be reportedly tried to stop people from posting stories about said hack.

Representational Image. Image: tech2

As per the report by TNW, there are multiple Facebook users who are saying that when they attempt to post links to the story about Facebook being hacked, their actions were blocked. One of the victims happened to be the very well known UK-based news website, The Guardian, whose story on the Facebook hack was not being shown on the website.

FB is also blocking this @AP link, a very bad look https://t.co/8uKjuvhP0U

— kate conger (@kateconger) September 28, 2018

The report states that Facebook had flagged the posts as it saw a great number of people posting the same stories which made the algorithm believe that these posts were spam.

Facebook will be replaced. pic.twitter.com/lyoaWhcmJO

— Bjorn Larsen (@bjorn) September 28, 2018

Now while this explanation could be true, it is really hard to see why posting a link multiple times constitutes as spam. Could Facebook actively be removing links that give it bad publicity? As it is this could quite possibly be the worst year in Facebook's 14 year history after the Cambridge Analytica fiasco unfolded leading to Mark Zuckerberg's congressional hearing. Could the year get any worse for the company?