Fake news fools Facebook’s Safety Check system in Bangkok

Fake news reports of an explosion in Bangkok, Thailand, triggered Facebook’s Safety Check program in the region, The Independent reports. For an hour beginning at 9PM local time on December 27th, anyone in Thailand’s capital city saw reports of an explosion and a prompt to mark themselves as safe. However, there was no actual bomb scare in Bangkok tonight.

Facebook’s Safety Check system is powered, in part, by an algorithm that pulls from user posts and news sources to determine whether a catastrophic event has occurred. This time around, it appears the algorithm used unreliable and fake news sources to “confirm” the nonexistent explosion.

Channel NewsAsia correspondent Saksith Saiyasombut shared a photo of the news stories Facebook displayed with the Safety Check; the top hit was a news-scraping site, not a source of trusted original reporting, he said.

The “source” of the @Facebook Safety Check for Bangkok: A fake news site that scrapped stuff from elsewhere…! pic.twitter.com/i6Q2k8XBxP

— Saksith Saiyasombut (@SaksithCNA) December 27, 2016

Facebook disabled the safety check at roughly 10PM local time. We’ve reached out to the social networking site for more information on tonight’s false positive in Bangkok and will update this story as we hear back.

Fake news has been a thorn in Facebook’s side for months now. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently rolled out an updated system to fight the propagation of untrue and misleading news articles on the site, working with third-party fact-checkers like Snopes, ABC News and Politifact to flag suspicious stories.

Via: The Independent, The Verge