Facebook caught automatically blocking AP and Guardian stories about the theirmassive data breach

This morning, news broke that a massive data breach has exposed the personal information of 50 million Facebook users to hackers. A company blog reports that nearly 90 million users were forced to log out out of their accounts as a security precaution and provided little detail on what personal information attackers were able to access. Shortly after, reports began to circulate on Twitter that Facebook was blocking a Guardian story about the breach from being posted on its platform: Within minutes, additional reports began to circulate that an Associated Press story about the breach was being blocked as well: Internet users and journalists struggled to make sense of why Facebook was censoring this massive news story for over an hour until reports once again surfaced on Twitter suggesting that the block had been resolved: While it appears as though Facebookâs effort to block the story was an anti-SPAM glitch, itâs hard to imagine how this day could have gone much worse for Facebook.

The breach and censorship news comes on the heels of multiple privacy scandals for the social media giant, including a new SEC investigation into Facebookâs statements regarding Cambridge Analytica, and revelations that advertisers could target phone numbers used to enable two-factor authentication that makes online accounts more secure.

Source: fightforthefuture.org