Over the last few days people all over the world have been complaining that their links containing real information about the coronavirus on Facebook have been taken down, and they’ve been criticizing the company of censorship.

The people who posted those links were told the they had violated Facebook Inc.’s Community Standards, in this case posting information that was deemed misinformation.

On Tuesday Guy Rosen, Facebook’s safety and integrity head, admitted some COVID-19 posts had incorrectly been removed, but over the last 24 hours more people complained that their legitimate posts had gone missing.

Earlier in March, Facebook said it was winning the battle against coronavirus misinformation, although it seems Facebook and other companies have been struggling somewhat since telling their staff to work from home.

According to Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos, the company’s human moderation staff now working from home are not able to do their job. The automated system has taken over, and that’s why so many legitimate and sometimes valuable coronavirus-related posts have been purged.

“It looks like an anti-spam rule at FB is going haywire,” Stamos said in a tweet Wednesday. “Facebook sent home content moderators yesterday, who generally can’t WFH due to privacy commitments the company has made. We might be seeing the start of the ML [Machine Learning] going nuts with less human oversight.”

He was replying to scores of people on Twitter asking him why genuine articles about the virus were going missing and they were getting warnings.

Stamos added that the problem was partly because of spammers using COVID-19 in their posts, and without the human moderators, the spam-detection system had come across as rather zealous. Answering to people complaining that Facebook was involved in some kind of sinister conspiracy and was censoring legitimate news, Stamos said all the legitimate posts that were removed will in time reappear.

The automated system wasn’t only taking down posts related to the virus. Some of the complaints on Stamos’ Twitter feed stated that some posts removed included one about anxiety, one about the Irish language and another about a museum.

Image: Facebook