As wildfires burned in Colorado, a Facebook ‘spam’ filter blocked official emergency info this summer across the state
During the Interlaken Fire near Leadville this summer, Facebook twice suspended the Interlaken Fire Information page set up by wildfire officials
As wildfires burned thousands of acres in Colorado this summer, wildfire officials were also battling an automated feature that kept blocking Facebook posts and pages created to circulate emergency information.
During the Interlaken Fire, which burned more than 700 acres at Twin Lakes near Leadville in June, an incident management team working with the U.S. Forest Service created the Interlaken Fire Information page to share updates on the fire, including evacuation orders.
But firefighter-paramedic Bethany Urban, who was the lead public information officer for the Interlaken Fire, said that Facebook removed the fire information page from the social media platform entirely on two occasions during the fire. In other cases, Urban said the social media platform removed individual posts containing official fire information.
“Through a large part of the incident, when they weren’t taking the page down, they were deleting our posts. We would put them up then they would disappear,” Urban said. “It would say we were violating some community standards, which of course for the life of us we couldn’t figure out what we would be violating by posting fire information.”
In the social media age, wildfire officials say that Facebook has proved to be one of the best tools to reach communities where they’re at. But early on during the Interlaken Fire, Facebook started removing the daily updates Urban posted to the fire information page. She said when a post disappeared from Facebook, she would receive a notification that a post had been removed but not indicating which post.
Then, on June 13, when the fire was 0% contained and officials were working to share updates, including pre-evacuation orders and closures, Facebook suspended the Interlaken Fire Information page altogether.
Wildfire officials attempted to reach out to Meta, Facebook’s parent company, to find out why the page had been suspended and removed from the social media platform but “there was not a lot of recourse,” Urban said. She said she doesn’t know what happened in the background but Facebook eventually restored the Interlaken Fire Information page.
However, about a week later, the fire information page was removed from the social media platform again, this time with a notice that it had been suspended for 3,649 days, Urban said. Again, the page was later reinstated.
“It was very frustrating trying to manage that fire and put that information out there,” Urban said. “We were just thankful that we weren’t in the middle of a fire that was up and running as we were trying to evacuate hundreds of people. That would have made this even more detrimental.”
In Colorado, it wasn’t just the Interlaken Fire where wildfire officials encountered issues with Facebook removing official wildfire information. As the Oak Ridge Fire burned more than 1,000 acres southwest of Pueblo, the Oak Ridge Fire 2024 page was also briefly suspended from Facebook, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
Another Facebook page, Colorado Wildfire Information, also experienced issues with the social media platform removing posts that circulated wildfire information. Fort Collins resident Adam Johnson, who has run the Colorado Wildfire Information page for about five years, said he’s a private individual who is not associated with official wildfire management.
But since the High Park Fire that killed one person and burned more than 87,000 acres near Fort Collins in 2012, Johnson said he has been helping to circulate wildfire information on Facebook and other social media platforms.
It was only this summer, though, that Johnson started noticing Facebook removing posts from official wildfire pages. He said Facebook also removed individual posts he made to the Colorado Wildfire Information page more than a dozen times.
“Until recently, Facebook was the easiest place to compile information in one place from multiple sources,” Johnson said. “But when Facebook removes an update, or removes a page altogether … people lose what was once a fairly reliable place to find information.”
In a statement to Summit Daily News, a Meta spokesperson said that the social media company had determined that the wildfire information posts in Colorado “were incorrectly removed by our automated spam detection tools.”
“The posts on these pages have been restored,” the Meta statement said. “We’re continuing to work to prevent government and disaster relief websites from being impacted by this type of enforcement.”
An investigation by the Washington Post found that Facebook was removing emergency-related posts in Colorado and elsewhere in the country. The Post compiled more than 40 examples of Facebook removing emergency-related posts, including during at least 20 fires, such as the massive Park Fire that burned more than 400,000 acres in California, since June.
U.S. Forest Service forest fire prevention specialist Vidalia Vigil, with the Pike-San Isabel National Forests, said wildfire officials use a lot of different platforms to communicate with the public during an active incident. Vigil said Facebook has been “our main tool.”
During the Interlaken Fire, when the Interlaken Fire Information page was taken down, the Pike-San Isabel National Forests reverted back to posting fire updates on its own Facebook page, Vigil said. Wildfire officials also use InciWeb.gov, phone lines and in-person communications to reach communities, she said.
But Facebook is one of the first places many people turn to find information in an emergency and the platform allows wildfire officials to reach a broad swathe of the community, Vigil said. She said it can erode public trust when that emergency information is blocked.
“I think it just really breaks that line of communication. It could quickly ruin our consistency with messaging,” Vigil said. “It could break that trust that we’re trying to gain with the community because all of a sudden you have the information, then you don’t have it. Just that uncertainty makes communication during an emergency very difficult.”
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