Facebook Bots Flags US Declaration of Independence as Hate Speech

 Facebook has apologized after its bots flagged the US Declaration of Independence as a "hate speech."

According to reports, Facebooks content-filtering algorithms flagged parts of the documents as hate speech after a Liberty, Texas-based newspaper, the Liberty County Vindicator, posted on the Social media network small bites from the Declaration in the lead up to the country's Independence Day on July 4.

The Newspaper broke the Declaration down into 12 small bites which they decided to post each morning from June 24 to July 4. The first nine broken Declaration were posted as planned, however, the part 10 which consisted of paragraphs 27-31 did not appear in the post. Instead, they received a from Facebook saying the post was against their standard on hate speech.



Though Facebook later restored the post and tendered an apology to the newspaper, The Liberty County Vindicator still said they couldn't discern what exactly triggered Facebook's filtering program to flag their post. Though, the editor suspected the phrase "Indian Savages" to be the most likely cause.

"It looks like we made a mistake and removed something you posted on Facebook that didn't go against our Community Standards. We want to apologise and let you know we've restored your content and removed any blocks on your accounts related to this incorrect action," Facebook said in a statement sent to The Vindicator.

Facebook over the past weeks have been experiencing bugs related issues. Some days ago, Facebook announced that about 800,000 users on its platform were affected by a bug that temporarily unblocked people whom other Facebook users had blocked on the social platform.

A similar bug incident also happened on Facebook some weeks ago when the social media giant announced how a critical security bug exposed about 14 million users private posts to the public.