With concerns over coronavirus on the rise and in a political climate that can generously be described as “charged,” when Facebook began marking and removing posts linking to COVID-19-related articles as spam, many users on the social media platform began eyeing their friends lists with suspicion and even floating conspiracy theories.

But the culprit it seems is a “bug in an anti-spam system unrelated to any changes in our content moderator workforce,” Facebook Vice President of Integrity Guy Rosen tweeted. “We’re in the process of fixing and bringing all these posts back.”

On Tuesday evening
Facebook users began complaining that their posts linking to coronavirus-related
material – even those that were fact-checked and came from legitimate sources –
were being marked as spam and hidden from view.