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Facebook apologizes for glitch that caused pornographic images to appear on feeds

ATLANTA — Social media giant Facebook is apologizing Tuesday for a glitch that caused pornography to appear on some users’ feeds.

Channel 2′s Mike Petchenik spoke to one metro woman who came across the inappropriate content and has a warning for parents.

“When I typed this quote into the search bar, the results that popped up were cartoon sexual innuendo memes,” Brandy Voth said. “With some, you know, pornographic phrases.”

She’s not alone.

“We started to see posts from parents saying, there’s this, we think bug in Facebook where we go to the search bar, and click on videos and pornographic content is being served to us,” Titania Jordan said.

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Jordan is the chief parenting officer of Atlanta-based Bark. The internet security company monitors social media and other sites children frequent and alerts parents of any inappropriate content.

Jordan told Petchenik that parents from Atlanta and across the country experienced the same issue. Petchenik reached out to Facebook and received this statement.

“We’re investigating reports of some inappropriate content showing up in some searches. We’re implementing changes and, out of an abundance of caution, we have disabled certain parts of search until we complete our investigation. We apologize for this error.”

Jordan explained it’s an issue across the Internet. She said some studies suggest roughly 70% of all kids will be exposed to some kind of inappropriate content online.

She said it’s important to monitor what kids are watching and to be prepared to discuss it if they come across something they shouldn’t.

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