Facebook "News Feed" Allegedly Boosted Misinformation and Violating Content Following Use of MSI Metric

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Discrimination and Toxicity (Exposure to toxic content) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

• Colorado AI Act Colorado (United States) · Repealed · binding
• India DPDP Act India · Partially applicable · binding
• Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence Italy · In force · binding
• NYC Local Law 144 (automated employment decision tools) New York (United States) · In force · binding
• EU AI Act European Union · Partially applicable · binding

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (1)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

1. 15 Sep 2021
   Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead.

   wsj.com · Keach Hagey, Jeff Horwitz

Who was involved

Alleged deployer

Facebook

Alleged developer

Facebook

Alleged harmed party

Facebook Users, Facebook Content Creators

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Risk domain

Discrimination and Toxicity

Risk subdomain

1.2 Exposure to toxic content

Causal entity

AI

Intent

Unintentional

Timing

Post-deployment

Harm level

AI tangible harm event

Sectors

information and communication

Countries

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Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 1.2.

• Harmful Content

  "The LLM-generated content sometimes contains biased, toxic, and private information"

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Toxicity

  "Toxicity means the generated content contains rude, disrespectful, and even illegal information"

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Toxic Training Data

  "Following previous studies [96], [97], toxic data in LLMs is defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is opposite to a polite, positive, and healthy language environment, including hate speech, offe...

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Not-Suitable-for-Work (NSFW) Prompts

  "Inputting a prompt contain an unsafe topic (e.g., notsuitable-for-work (NSFW) content) by a benign user. "

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Controversial Opinions

  The controversial views expressed by large models are also a widely discussed concern. Bang et al. (2021) evaluated several large models and found that they occasionally express inappropriate or extremist views when disc...

  Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

• Toxicity and Abusive Content

  This typically refers to rude, harmful, or inappropriate expressions.

  Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

• Harmful responses

  "Current Frontier AI mdoels amplify existing biases within their training data and can be manipulated into providing potentially harmful responses, for example abusive language or discriminatory responses91,92. This is n...

  Future Risks of Frontier AI (GOS2023)

• Violation of social norms

  "Second, because LLMs are trained on internet text data, there is also a risk that model weights encode functions which, if deployed in particular contexts, would violate social norms of that context. Following the princ...

  The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

• 2 Apr 2026KBS AI Translation Subtitles Reportedly Broadcast Profanity During Artemis II Launch Livestream
• 10 Mar 2026Grok Allegedly Generated Publicly Visible Sexist Abuse Targeting Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter After X User Prompt
• 5 Feb 2026Trump Reportedly Posted Purportedly AI-Generated Racist Video Depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as Apes on Truth Social
• 2 Jan 2026Tencent's WeChat-Integrated Yuanbao Chatbot Reportedly Insulted User During Coding Debug Request
• 21 Nov 2025Alleged Harmful Outputs and Data Exposure in Children's AI Products by FoloToy, Miko, and Character.AI
• 24 Oct 2025AI Training Dataset for Detecting Nudity Allegedly Found to Contain CSAM Images of Identified Victims

Other incidents involving Facebook

• 1 Dec 2022Facebook's Automated Moderation Allowed Ads Threatening Election Workers to be Posted
• 8 Dec 2021Facebook AI-Supported Moderation for Ads Failed to Detect Violating Content
• 21 Nov 2021Facebook’s Hate Speech Detection Algorithms Allegedly Disproportionately Failed to Remove Racist Content towards Minority Groups
• 1 Oct 2021Facebook Internally Reported Failure of Ranking Algorithm, Exposing Harmful Content to Viewers over Months
• 20 Jul 2021Facebook's Automated Moderation Flagged Gardening Group's Language Use by Mistake
• 1 Mar 2021Facebook's Automated Tools Failed to Adequately Remove Hate Speech, Violence, and Incitement