Facebook Search Shows Photos of Your Female, but Not Male Friends

Facebook is arguably the most popular social media platform around the globe, used by users young and old. Recently, a Belgian security researcher stumbled upon a weird glitch in Facebook's search function that only let him search for photos of his female friends but not his male friends. This glitch was discovered by Belgian white-hat hacker Inti De Ceukelaire.

This glitch - reported on Twitter earlier this week - has been corroborated by others too, such as the TheNextWeb, which reports that it was able to replicate this glitch across various Facebook accounts. We were also independently able to replicate the glitch. The report explains that when you type “photos of my female friends” into Facebook's search bar, you'll get a series of random photos from your female friends. However, when the moment you type in the same search string but replace “female” with “male,” you're presented with a series of random photos from across Facebook. It's also reported that these random photos typically came from groups and accounts that that they did not follow.

This is certainly a strange glitch, which no one seems to have found until now. However, this isn't the first time De Ceukelaire has shot into the limelight for such discoveries. Over the part few years, this white-hat hacker has been notorious for pulling many pranks, but all with the intention of exposing security and privacy limitations in the everyday services that we consume. In 2017, De Ceukelaire reportedly used Facebook's private search functionality to extract the personal email of the current First Lady of the United States, Melania Trump.

However, in the case of the Facebook search bug, De Ceukelaire tells TheNextWeb that he came across this glitch purely by chance. “I found that I could no longer filter by men, but it was still possible to filter by females,” said De Ceukelaire. Now that this is out in the open, let's see how long it is before Facebook fixes it.