Facebook users got a new addition to their News Feed on Tuesday: A yellow-orange icon with the question “Does this post contain hate speech?” And an option to select “yes” or “no.”
This feature, which Facebook called a “bug” in a statement to tech news site ArsTechnica, appeared on every user post, according to reports, and allegedly appeared twice on ads.
If users clicked “no,” the message disappeared. But if users selected “yes,” three unfinished-looking options appeared, as documented by one Twitter user:
when you click the "yes" button on the "Does this post contain hate speech?" Prompt on facebook you're presented with a form that clearly wasn't supposed to be pushed to live.
What a terrible website. Pic.twitter.com/s8OkovU78A
— @Lonestartallboi.bsky.social (@LonestarTallBoi) May 1, 2018
The “hate speech” question appeared for less than 30 minutes before disappearing by noon ET.
“This was an internal test we were working on to understand different types of speech, including speech we thought would not be hate,” a Facebook spokesperson told Coins2Day. “A bug caused it to launch publicly. It’s been disabled.”
Users flooded Twitter to document the glitch, which apparently appeared under posts about food, dogs, and former boy band N*SYNC “It’s gonna be May” memes:
https://twitter.com/bafeldman/status/991335153455820801
https://twitter.com/JillFilipovic/status/991337197902196736
https://twitter.com/AndrewWMullins/status/991337021556822023
https://twitter.com/arawnsley/status/991337234308755457
This is weird.
Facebook is asking me about whether *my own post* on Facebook contains hate speech.
And also, the post is just a NYT story about restaurant trends in Austin, to which I've added no commentary. Pic.twitter.com/ZIrUW4IW4q
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) May 1, 2018
https://twitter.com/ColinHantsCo/status/991333846670069765
everyone: yo facebook your company has an issue with hate speech
facebook: our top engineers are designing algorithms to solve this problem
facebook: pic.twitter.com/Gn9QMCqRfF
— phil (@PhilJamesson) May 1, 2018
The bug appeared on the same day as the 2018 Facebook’s F8 developer conference in San Jose, Calif. That featured a presentation by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He announced new features for Instagram and Messenger along with a planned dating service.
This year’s F8 comes amid backlash against Facebook over user privacy and election meddling, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which data from up to 87 million users was inappropriately obtained by a third party.