For several hours on Tuesday morning, two posts about the election disappeared from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wall, before being restored around 1pm ET.
The posts pertained to the company’s role in the 2016 presidential election and Zuckerberg’s views on how fake news sites impacted it. While the posts have since been restored, they thankfully were still available after their original removal via Google Cache and the Internet Archive.
The first post, from Nov. 12, makes the case that while the company has more work to do in regards to preventing its service from being used to spread fake news, most of the content people see is accurate. Zuckerberg goes so far as to say that “more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic.” He didn’t provide any proof of those claims.
In addition a follow-up from Nov. 19 was removed. It outlined the company’s plans for fighting the spread of fake news stories via better reporting tools and stronger hoax detection.
In a statement to the Verge, a Facebook spokesperson said the posts were removed by mistake: “This was caused by an error in one of our systems, and the posts have now been restored. Mark’s account was not compromised, and he stands behind the words in his posts.”
While the removable of these important posts does seem odd, it’s important to note that other posts about the election, and the fake news issue, have remained up on Zuckerberg’s page. It would be odd to delete these posts but leave up the video of him saying the fake news controversy was “pretty crazy” if they were trying to rewrite the record.
As of now no election posts are missing from Zuckerberg’s wall.
H/T the Verge