Facebook Bug Causes Users To Be Asked If Every Picture Is Hate Speech

Pretty much everyone is in agreement that Facebook needs to do more to protect users and remove offensive content from the platform. Even Facebook has vowed to do better. However, a bug caused the site to go a bit overboard this week, and it began asking users if every picture contained hate speech — including photos of puppies, tropical vacations and more.

Facebook inadvertently rolled out the tool before its annual F8 developer’s conference, where Mark Zuckerberg announced a few major changes to the platform’s privacy rules. However, the hate speech reporting feature was only live for about a half an hour before Facebook noticed and took it down again.

“This was an internal test we were working on to understand different types of speech, including speech we thought would not be hate,” Facebook said in a statement. “A bug caused it to launch publicly. It’s been disabled.”

It would be great if Facebook actually introduced some kind of hate speech reporting function. And while it’s reassuring to know Facebook is at least thinking about it, let’s hope that when that day comes, it isn’t prominently featured on every single post you see — especially on pictures of puppies.