Facebook temporarily bans itself for violating its own misinformation policy
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday after the company temporarily banned itself for violating its own misinformation policy.
“We take fighting misinformation seriously and will ban all entities who violate our policy,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “We got confused about our illogical and contradictory policies that we had to censor ourselves for a few hours until we cleared things up.”
Many Facebook users—including all the world’s sex traffickers—were unable do business for most of the day.
Is this unprecedented?
No, social media platforms consistently contradict their own terms of service, causing them to shut down or censor themselves. Recently, YouTube banned YouTube for showing videos of the CDC contradicting the CDC, which violated YouTube’s rules.
“Basically, they’re all a bunch of idiots wielding an unheard of amount of power and sometimes that catches up to them,” Genesius Time Technology Editor Richard Feynman said.