Facebook has found a bug in the audience selector for posts, which was automatically suggesting users post publicly instead of selecting an audience. The company, yesterday, June 8, started informing the affected 14 million users, asking them to review posts that they made at the time.
The bug came up when Facebook was developing a new way to share featured items. As the featured items are public, the suggested audience for the correspondent posts was set to public. The Facebook audience selector-error is set to the public for all new posts, not just the featured items.
Facebook has clarified that no post was impacted, and users can still choose an audience for posts like before. The bug has been taken care of, and the audience selector has been set back to normal.
In case you are reviewing, you get to see a notification after logging in, which will redirect you to a page with more info. This page also contains the review of posts you made when the bug was up.
This issue adds to the privacy scandals that Facebook has been suffering from recently. The bug didn’t mind any default setting of the users; if they missed noticing the change, some posts might have gone on to reach a broader audience than intended.
The social media giant said that the bug was active from May 18 to 27. The fix came on May 22, but it could not revert the settings back to normal until later.
