Facebook's Sri Lanka Crisis page showed white nationalist content at top

It would appear that Facebook’s Crisis response page, which crops up on the social media giant’s platform to help people in a time of tragedy, is not safe from Facebook’s own algorithms. As per a report, Facebook’s top video suggestion on the crisis page following **multiple bombings in Sri Lanka**  was an Islamophobic post. [caption id=“attachment_6407681” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Facebook logo is reflected in glasses. Reuters[/caption] CNET, which first found out about this, says that the video comes from a white supremacist page called ‘Europeans’ and promotes white nationalist content. The caption on this video feature on the Crisis response page reads “So if Muslims carried out the Sri Lanka attack, can we assume all Muslims are guilty. That is what we were told after NZ - all whites were white supremacists apaprently..[sic].”

This is also not the first time that Facebook’s Crisis response page has been misused. During the infamous 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, multiple posts on the Safety Check page (a feature of Facebook’s Crisis response page) reportedly were asking for  bitcoin donations and advertised spam.  The report also says that even after the ‘Europeans’ post was removed, two videos identical in nature to the previous post cropped up with two different groups as their source. These two groups are run by the same managers who run ‘Europeans’. Not only that but it would appear that the second and third posts yesterday on the Crisis page were from advertisers who had less than 30 followers each. In the wake of the attack, Sri Lankan government has restricted access to sites including Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Viber, and YouTube. Facebook also did not respond to the government’s request for better content moderation until it cut off the social network entirely.