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Facebook temporarily yanked several photos capturing a shipwreck off the coast of Libya last week because they were mistaken for spam.
Syrian artist Khaled Barakeh uploaded photos late last week depicting a shipwreck off the coast of Zuwara, a port in western Libya. The boat reportedly carried nearly 400 migrants, many of whom seemed to be trapped in the ship's cargo hold when it capsized.
Barakeh uploaded seven photos to Facebook one day after the disaster, in an album called "Multicultural Graveyard." Several of the photos appeared to show young drowned victims from the shipwreck; one shot depicted a stack of orange body bags. It's unclear how Barakeh obtained the photos.
The photo album was shared more than 100,000 times before it was temporarily deleted, which some commenters called an act of censorship. Facebook, for its part, said that wasn't the case, chalking up the photo album's removal to an internal bug.
“This content was flagged in error by our systems as spam, and we have since corrected it," a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. "We apologize for the temporary removal of this content."
While the album was eventually restored to Barakeh's Facebook Timeline, this isn't the first time posts on the social network disappeared due to a bug. In April, for example, a number of posts from certain user accounts — Mashable's, included — briefly vanished for several hours due to what Facebook called "an error in our system."
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