The Washington Post wrote that Facebook “it has merely corrected a “bug” that allowed [Jonathan] Albright, who is research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, to access information he never should have been able to find in the first place.” The October 12, 2017 article entitled “Facebook takes down data and thousands of posts, obscuring reach of Russian disinformation” included these comments:
Social media analyst Jonathan Albright got a call from Facebook the day after he published research last week showing that the reach of the Russian disinformation campaign was almost certainly larger than the company had disclosed.
While the company had said 10 million people read Russian-bought ads, Albright had data suggesting that the audience was at least double that — and maybe much more — if ordinary free Facebook posts were measured as well.
But the deletion of the posts and the related data struck Albright as a major loss for the world’s understanding of the Russian campaign
Was it really a bug?