Facebook said it accidentally deleted thousands of posts from a transparency platform it owns related to or from the days surrounding the January 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, according to a report from POLITICO.
The posts on Crowdtangle — a “content discovery and social monitoring platform” owned by Facebook — included people suggesting or encouraging violence. Tens of thousands of posts were entirely unavailable for viewing on the platform, according to a report from New York University.
When contacted by POLITICO, Facebook blamed the accidental removal on a technical error. The social media giant said it had addressed the issue, claiming all of the missing posts had always been available in their original form on Facebook.
But the news outlet — unclear on a firm number — estimated “scores of posts” from January 6, from incitement to news articles, are still missing.
It comes as Facebook is under pressure from Congressional legislators for extreme transparency. On Friday, Congress ordered the company to turn over large caches of data related to the insurrection and riot, including how it fumbled moderating misinformation.
“If Facebook knew about this, and just didn’t tell anyone, I think researchers should be pretty concerned about that fact,” NYU’s Laura Edelson told POLITICO, one of the report’s authors and an academic who relies on Crowdtangle’s accuracy.
“We came up tens of thousands of posts short. We knew something was clearly wrong,” Edelson said. “Researchers do assume that they are getting all the public content from Facebook pages that are indexed by Crowdtangle. Those assumptions have been violated in this case.”
NYU discovered the deletions after attempting to scrutinize what Facebook had erased for violating its content policies. Researchers said roughly 30% of posts in the days surrounding January 6 were missing.
The researchers first discovered the missing posts after comparing two versions of a Crowdtangle database of Facebook content produced by U.S. media outlets between September 2020 and January 2021.
“We appreciate the researchers bringing these posts to our attention,” a Facebook spokesperson told the news outlet, declining to confirm how many posts were still unavailable.
“At this point, Facebook has lost a tremendous amount of credibility, and I don’t really know how they are going to get it back,” Edelson contemplated.
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