Oops – Facebook “Hate Speech” reporting button accidentally went live

KEMBERLEE KAYE MAY 1, 2018 12:45 PM

Tuesday morning Facebook users found a weird new option — the ability to mark posts as “hate speech.”

My entire timeline was full of posts skewering the latest Facebook feature. Then, without warning, the report-everything-you-don’t-like-without-recognizing-the-subjectivity-of-your-actions option vanished.

This is what users were seeing (I’ve removed user names and images because the internet can be an awful place):

These screenshots were provided by our friends at PJ Media:

We reached out to Facebook. A spokesman provided the following comment:

“This was an internal test we were working on to understand different types of speech, including speech we thought would not be hate. A bug caused it to launch publicly. It’s been disabled.”

They may be testing other types of speech reporting functions, but it’s a might bit curious that the option accidentally published was asking users to report hate speech.

What could possibly go wrong? Oh, ya know, just THIS:

It’s almost like Facebook is trying to kill itself.

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