Facebook Inc said a filter for combating spam on the social network was beset by a bug that mistakenly eliminated legitimate news stories and other posts, miscategorizing them as content that violates its rules.

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Several users complained on social media that their posts, including those about the novel coronavirus outbreak, were taken down and replaced by a notice that read, “This post goes against our community standards on spam.”

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In response, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice-president of integrity, said in a Twitter post that it was a bug in an anti-spam system. Later he tweeted that all content that was incorrectly removed had been restored, including “posts on all topics -- not just those related to Covid-19. This was an issue with an automated system that removes links to abusive websites, but incorrectly removed a lot of other posts too.”