A day after Facebook launched a blog series exploring its safety and privacy measures, the Guardian has reported that some of the company’s own moderators found themselves at risk on the platform.
According to the Guardian, Facebook “inadvertently” exposed the personal details of content moderators to suspected terrorist users on the site. The security slip reportedly affected over 1,000 Facebook employees in 22 departments through the company’s moderation software, which employees use to review and, as appropriate, remove content flagged for sexual material, hate speech, or terrorist propaganda, among other things.
Approximately 40 of those workers affected were from a counter-terrorism unit in Dublin, Ireland, at Facebook’s European headquarters. The breach reportedly resulted from a bug in Facebook’s moderation software that was discovered in 2016, and which caused the personal profiles of content moderators to appear among activity notifications for online groups after moderators had removed the groups’ administrators for terms-of-service violations.
The Guardian spoke to one of six workers whose privacy breaches were “assessed to be ‘high priority’” based on Facebook’s determination that potential terrorists had likely viewed the employees’ personal profiles. That worker, an Iraqi-born Irish citizen in his early twenties, told the Guardian he had fled Ireland and gone into hiding after finding out that seven Facebook users associated with a suspected terrorist group that he’d banned from the site had viewed his personal profile. According to the employee, the suspected terrorist group is Egypt-based and backed Hamas, and contained members who sympathized with the Islamic State.
In a statement to the Guardian, Facebook confirmed the breach and said it had since tweaked the software to “better detect and prevent these types of issues from occurring.” A company spokesperson continued, “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.”
The employee who spoke to the Guardian was reportedly one of hundreds of typically low-paid contractors known as “community operations analysts,” whose job is to monitor Facebook for content that violates its terms of service. He told the publication that he’d relocated to eastern Europe for five months from fear of retaliation–something his family had personally experienced in Iraq before he came to Ireland as an asylum seeker.
“It was getting too dangerous to stay in Dublin,” he said. “The only reason we’re in Ireland was to escape terrorism and threats.”
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