Whoops! Facebook Outed Its Moderators To Suspected Terrorists

An Iraqi-born Irish citizen worked for a contractor tasked with policing Facebook for terrorist activity. After undergoing two weeks of training, he spent most of his days closely monitoring the online activity of various terror networks and going through the highly disturbing material. He would review and remove content that breached Facebook’s community standards and ban administrators of groups affiliated with terrorist organisations. In order to log into Facebook’s moderation system, he was instructed to use his personal Facebook account. Because of a bug in the system, his identity was exposed to the very suspected terrorists whose content he was scrutinising.

The security lapse was described by The Guardian, which reported that identities of more than 1,000 of Facebook’s workers were revealed. Moderator anonymity was compromised when they banned a group administrator for a terms-of-service violation. At this point, moderators' personal information would show up in the group’s activity log visible to the other admins in the group.

The already mentioned anonymous moderator began suspecting that something was wrong when he started receiving friend requests from people affiliated with the terrorist organisations he was monitoring. Now, he is among six individuals considered to be at the highest risk of retribution. Fearing for his safety, the moderator, who first came to Ireland as an asylum seeker when he was a child, quit his job and went into hiding in Eastern Europe for a period of time.

The Guardian’s account of Facebook’s glitch not only sheds some more light on its moderating processes and counter-terrorism procedures, but also gives a chilling record of the company’s lack of empathy towards its workers. Claiming that there was “a good chance” the suspected terrorists failed to connect the dots, it seems like no biggie happened according to the platform. At the same time, the unmasked moderator was so terrified that he decided to flee the country.