Facebook bug causes great alarm among its Content Moderators: Personal details leaked

Facebook's security flaw has potentially put the company content moderators at risk.

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Well, a bug has now caused great alarm among Facebook's content moderators as a security glitch has now resulted in the identities and personal details of a number of its content moderators being leaked to suspected terrorist users on the social network.

 
Facebook leaked personal details of moderators to suspected terrorists

According to Guardian, a bug in Facebook's software had caused the personal profiles of content moderators to be automatically pushed as notifications in the activity log of the Facebook groups, whose administrators had been removed for terms of service violations. So this error inadvertently allowed personal details of Facebook moderators to be viewed by the remaining admins of the group.

 

The publication cites that the security lapse has reportedly affected more than 1,000 workers across 22 departments at Facebook who used the company's moderation software to review and remove inappropriate content from the platform, including sexual material, hate speech and terrorist propaganda.

After the security glitch, around 40 of those workers affected were from a counter-terrorism unit in Dublin, Ireland, at Facebook's European headquarters. Moreover, six of those moderators were declared as "high priority" victims after Facebook concluded that their personal profiles were likely viewed by potential terrorists.

Facebook leaked personal details of moderators to suspected terrorists

When questioned about the breach, Facebook did confirm the same to the publication and further stated that the social media giant did make technical changes to "better detect and prevent these types of issues from occurring."

"We care deeply about keeping everyone who works for Facebook safe," a spokesman told the Guardian. "As soon as we learned about the issue, we fixed it and began a thorough investigation to learn as much as possible about what happened."

Facebook has reportedly supplied the six "high priority" moderators with new home security systems, company transport, and is also providing counseling through its employee assistance program.

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