By its own equations and algorithms, Facebook was conned. Last December 27, 2016, the social media giant activated its safety check feature but untruthfully indicated that there was a bomb scare in Bangkok, Thailand. Facebook users in that part of the world saw an alarm to mark themselves "safe", while there were minimal details on where or when the explosion took place in Bangkok.

The Safety Check alert came at around 9 PM, Bangkok time and was removed after an hour. The news that triggered the explosion alert is linked back to outdated news from Bangkok Informer last 2015, regarding the Erawan Shrine bombing.

The Verge released Facebook's statement related to the issue which read, "Safety Check was activated today in Thailand following an explosion. As with all Safety Check activation, Facebook relies on a trusted third party to first confirm the incident and on the community to use the tool and share with friends and family."

According to BBC, an incident happened in the nation's capital where a man threw a table tennis ball sized explosive like an item or rather firecrackers at a building of the government. Facebook claimed that this was another incident that enabled the Safety Check feature to activate. Even though there was no explosion, the page that prompted the incident was entitled "The Explosion in Bangkok." Also, there were no sources and links to the original source of the news stated.

The number of stories that were linked cited the 2015 explosion in the Erawan Shrine and a blog post that scarcely translates to "When your friend digs up news about a bombing that happened a year ago to share on Facebook, so very annoying." The social media company is now investigating as to how the unrelated stories were linked to that day's Safety Check page.

Last November, the social networking giant announced that the feature will be activated by a set of algorithms that checks and analyses trending posts by the platform users in a specific area and gives the users to activate the feature. During that time a Facebook engineer, Peter Cottle, who assisted in building the Safety Check Feature, told The Verge that the algorithms use an outsourced enterprise software to thoroughly fact check the incident before activating the feature.

Although this was not the first incident, that such a goof up happened. Last March, Facebook alerted users in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries to mark their status safe after a bombing in Pakistan.