BiasMedium
Facebook’s Moderation Algorithm Banned Users for Historical Evidence of Slavery
- Occurred
- Jun 11, 2020
- Published
- Jun 13, 2020
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Facebook’s automated content moderation was acknowledged by a company spokesperson to have erroneously censored and banned Australian users from posting an article containing a 1890s photo of Aboriginal men in chains over nudity as historical evidence of slavery in Australia.
Developers
Deployers
Harmed parties
- Facebook users sharing photo evidence of slavery
- Facebook users
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: Algorithmic bias led to wrongful censorship of historical evidence, causing controversy and user bans.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8