Facebook activates safety check based on fake news report, causes ‘explosion’ scare in Bangkok
The company said a ‘trusted third party’ had confirmed the information.
News agencies in Bangkok were forced to reassure its citizens that there had been no explosion in the city on Tuesday, after social networking site Facebook erroneously activated its “safety check” feature based on a report from 2015. Users saw the option to mark themselves safe pop up at 9 pm, but initially had little information on what the conflict was or where it had taken place.
The site later shared two reports: One of a man throwing “ping pong bombs” while protesting on the roof of a government building on Tuesday, and another that was a fake news piece by “Bangkok Informer”, which linked to a story about an explosion in 2015.
It turned out that the story to which the site had linked was on the 2015 Erawan Shrine bombing, which had left 20 people dead in the nation’s capital in August that year. Bangkok Informer, The Guardian reported, is a local site that shares articles from different sources, rather than creating content of its own. While the other report about the protestor was found to be true, no casualties were reported as a result of his actions. The safety check tool was taken down a few hours after it was activated.
However, a Facebook spokesperson argued, “As with all safety check activations, Facebook relies on a trusted third party to first confirm the incident and then on the community to use the tool and share with friends and family.” It is unclear what this third-party source is, though Facebook has variously mentioned that the safety check tool pops up when people in an area are talking about an incident.
Facebook has increasingly faced criticism for disseminating misleading or false information. While the company initially refused to take responsibility by saying it was not a media outlet, despite being one of the most popular digital sources for news, it later said it would tackle its fake news problem. It has also been accused of swinging the results of the United States elections after its algorithms failed to distinguish between fake news and real news.