Urgent Facebook warning – sinister hidden meaning behind CARROT emoji revealed

ANTI-VAXXERS have been using the carrot emoji as a way to secretly share dangerous posts on Facebook without being detected.

Groups with hundreds of thousands of members were found using the innocent vegetable instead of words like “Covid-19” or “vaccine” which would set the social network’s alarms off.

Getty

This allowed users to share unverified posts under the radar, claiming people had been injured or killed after their jab.

Facebook became a hotbed for conspiracy theories at the height of the pandemic, forcing bosses to add content warning labels on virtually everything related to coronavirus.

The site uses artificial intelligence to automatically detect anything suspicious.

But cunning anti-vaxxers were able to hide in plain sight with their simple trick.

BBC News, who uncovered the devious hack, reported the groups to Facebook owner Meta.

They were apparently banned but have since found their way back onto the platform.

One such group explicitly told its 250,000 members to “use code words for everything”.

The group’s rules warned users to “not use the c word, v word or b word ever” – referring to Covid, vaccine and booster.

Prof Alan Woodward, a cyber-security expert from Surrey University told the BBC: “It’s a modern form of steganography: writing and hiding a message in plain sight, but such that unless you know where to look you don’t see it.

“What all of this demonstrates is the futility of trying to automate moderation of content to prevent the sharing of ‘harmful’ material.

“At the very best you will be playing a game of whack-a-mole, as people develop new dialects with which to communicate.”

Meta said: “We have removed this group for violating our harmful misinformation policies and will review any other similar content in line with this policy.

“We continue to work closely with public health experts and the UK government to further tackle Covid vaccine misinformation.”

---

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

---