Facebook blocked the page of the French town of "Bitche" for weeks

Facebook is known for trying to remove content that might be obscene, offensive, or the like. What many do not know: This is often done fully automatically by means of an algorithm. There are not always people involved who take a close look at the case beforehand. And so mistakes are practically pre-programmed.

This has also happened to the French town of "Bitche", whose name apparently reminds the algorithm of a swear word directed against women. It was only on Tuesday afternoon that the page was reactivated after weeks. But the unblocking was not a matter of course: the city filed an objection and tried to contact Facebook through various channels, but this also seemed to be of no use at first: Facebook had communicated that the page violated the terms of use.

After the city then initially opened a new Facebook account under a different name, there was finally a happy turn of events: Facebook's France branch apologized to the mayor of "Bitche" for the misunderstanding, and the original page went back online.

The case impressively shows that algorithms are not capable of reliably assuming monitoring functions at the current state of the art. Any wrong word could thus mean account blocking. It becomes even more problematic if it subsequently takes weeks for a human to fix the error.