Zuckerberg’s posts mistakenly stripped from Facebook

What is it with companies taking down their CEO’s social media messages this month? First Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, and now Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg

The latter reportedly removed several posts published by the Facebook CEO in what it’s calling a “mistake”.

Eagle-eyed reporters at The Verge noticed that Zuckerberg’s posts about fake news on the social media site, as well as commentary on the US elections, were stripped from his timeline Tuesday, only to later be restored just before 8pm SAST.

Facebook’s fake news problem

One of these posts included a statement made by Zuckerberg on 18 November, regarding misinformation on Facebook.

“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously,” Zuckerberg explains in the post.

“Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information. We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We’ve made significant progress, but there is more work to be done,” he concludes.

Mark Zuckerberg’s posts on the US election and fake news were removed from Facebook for a brief moment yesterday evening

But clearly, the company’s systems aren’t quite ready yet.

According to a spokesperson quoted by The Verge, the posts, including the above example, were removed by “mistake”.

“This was caused by an error in one of our systems and the posts have now been restored.”

Facebook also confirmed that Zuckerberg’s account security was not compromised, and this was not influenced by outside factors, something that we’ve seen happen to a good few other CEOs this year too.

This wasn’t the first high-profile Facebook gaffe of the month though. Earlier in November, the company displayed a number of memorial banners above users’ profiles (including Zuckerberg’s) suggesting that they were dead. Facebook quickly remedied the “terrible error”.