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BiasMedium

Facebook’s Algorithm Mistook an Advertisement of Onions as Sexual Suggestive Content

Occurred
Oct 3, 2020
Published
Oct 6, 2020
Source
AI Incident Database

Summary

Facebook’s content moderation algorithm misidentified and removed a Canadian business’s advertisement containing a photo of onions as products of overtly sexual content, which was later reinstated after review.

Developers

  • Facebook

Deployers

  • Facebook

Harmed parties

  • The Seed Company by E.W. Gaze
  • businesses on Facebook

Classification

Category confidence: 85%
Severity confidence: 90%

Rationale: Algorithmic bias caused false content moderation, removing legitimate business ads due to misclassification.

Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8

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