Facebook flagged Uhuru’s congratulatory message to Yoweri Museveni.
Uganda’s election was a mess, Hon Museveni was accused of rigging the elections, shutting the internet down and intimidating citizens by the use of social media and the army.
It is a common practice for Presidents across the world to congratulate other Presidents when they win their elections. Nowadays, social media is another formal platform to communicate and in this case Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta sent out his congratulations on Facebook but Facebook flagged it and termed it as false. But the social platform claimed that the flagging was an error on their part and not intentional.
Facebook flagged his post as false information.
However, the message was not flagged but the image that was used had been fact-checked by PesaCheck hence the alert from Facebook.
PesaCheck issued a statement and wrote:
“The error appears to have originated from the automation system, which looks for similar content that has been fact-checked. In this case, both posts shared the same photo of Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni. When State House used the same image, the Facebook automation system immediately marked it as false. Within 15 minutes of the post being made, we corrected to indicate that the photo wasn’t false.”
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This might be true as Facebook is trying to curb the spread of misinformation and has been dealing with a lot of fake news especially regarding COVID-19 and other political issues.
In case you’re not aware, if you happen to post a picture that has been termed false you may have to pull down your whole account down. PesaCheck and Facebook issued a statement saying that they are currently working on this issue.
“We’re working with Facebook to try and prevent such errors from happening in future.”
It might be a small issue to you but as you can see it affects anyone and everyone. The State House Page had to take down both posts from Facebook and Twitter and it’s never easy to recover from that.
