Social media giant Facebook has goofed up big time by accidentally revealing the content moderators' personal information online, which will compromise security not only to their lives but also their family.
The Guardian, which broke the news first, reported that the incident actually happened in November 2016. A glitch in the company's server apparently caused the details of over 1,000 workers across 22 departments to get leaked online.
Affected workers are based at Facebook's European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. Among them, six have been tagged 'high-priority' victims, whose identities might have been accessed by potential terrorists.
Facebook has indeed acknowledged the incident and plugged the loophole, and also initiated an internal investigation to find the error that led to moderators' profiles getting leaked.
"We care deeply about keeping everyone who works for Facebook safe," a spokesman told The Guardian. "As soon as we learned about the issue, we fixed it and began a thorough investigation to learn as much as possible about what happened," he added.
It has come to light that some of the Facebook moderators were migrants from middle-east and had identified some terrorists on Facebook and banned them. Now, that their identities have been leaked, fearing threat to their lives and family, a few have already left the company and moved out of Dublin, while others are contemplating to quit.
In a related development, Facebook, earlier this week, stepped up its fight against terrorism by joining hands with high-profile security agencies to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI), in addition to human monitoring methods, to track and combat the circulation of radicalised violent-inciting materials on its social media sites. While the initiative is widely appreciated across the world, this incident has tarnished Facebook's image.
Read more: Facebook is using these 3 methods to fight terrorism on the social network, WhatsApp and Instagram
Watch this space for latest updates on Facebook.
