An-Najah News - Facebook’s head of safety said on Tuesday a bug was responsible for posts on topics including coronavirus being erroneously marked as spam, prompting widespread complaints from users of both its flagship app and photo-sharing app Instagram.

“This is a bug in an anti-spam system, unrelated to any change in our content moderator workforce,” Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president for integrity, said on Twitter.

“We’ve restored all the posts that were incorrectly removed, which included posts on all topics - not just those related to COVID-19. This was an issue with an automated system that removes links to abusive websites, but incorrectly removed a lot of other posts too,” he said.

The issue arose a day after Facebook announced that it was sending home for public health reasons all contract workers who perform content review services for the social media giant, which mostly outsources the work to independent companies.