Facebook glitch causes pages to automatically like their own posts

By Digiday • April 21, 2016 •

Facebook appears to be growing more sentient.

Publisher and brand administrators overseeing their Facebook pages have noticed a pesky glitch that automatically likes posts from their own account. More annoyingly, they complain, is that the bug also blocks them from “unliking” the posts.

While it’s not the most earth shattering issue to affect Facebook, a page administrator that runs a publisher account with more than 3.5 million followers told Digiday the bug is “annoying” because the bug makes it appears the page is inflating the number of likes. Also, “it looks silly to like your own posts.”

The problem has surfaced on Twitter, with one person wondering if it was malware, and even on Reddit.

Looks like page owners are auto-liking their own stuff, but the button is gray. #Malware or @facebook #error? Thanks pic.twitter.com/CO5TdPmYUF

— Lukas Fronk (@fronk) April 20, 2016

Facebook is “auto liking” all of my posts. I swear I don’t like myself that much.

— KJ (@KJonair) April 20, 2016

Hey @facebook – what’s w/ my company page “auto liking” posts we haven’t actually liked? #notcool

— Allison Bond (@A007) April 20, 2016

Don’t worry everyone, Facebook is aware of the issue according to a statement:

We wanted to let you know that we are aware of the issue currently affecting some Pages in which the Page likes certain posts on the Page without a page admin actually taking action to like the post. This is a widespread known issue and the team is actively working on a fix.

Whew. Now, where’s the like button on that news?

https://digiday.com/?p=173936