A group of Facebook engineers identified a \u201cmassive ranking failure\u201d that exposed as much as half of all News Feed views to potential \u201cintegrity risks\u201d over the past six months, according to an internal report on the incident obtained by The Verge<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The engineers first noticed the issue last October, when a sudden surge of misinformation began flowing through the News Feed, notes the report, which was shared inside the company last week. Instead of suppressing posts from repeat misinformation offenders that were reviewed by the company\u2019s network of outside fact-checkers, the News Feed was instead giving the posts distribution, spiking views by as much as 30 percent globally. Unable to find the root cause, the engineers watched the surge subside a few weeks later and then flare up repeatedly until the ranking issue was fixed on March 11th.<\/p>\n