Facebook tests anti-hate speech feature in News Feed hours before developer conference starts

Would you consider the last thing you saw on Facebook to be hate speech?

On Tuesday morning, Facebook began testing a feature that allows users to report posts on their News Feed as hate speech by clicking a button.

The only issue: some users reported seeing the feature on every single piece of user-generated content in their feeds, including advertisements.

The feature has disappeared now, but not before several eagle-eyed Twitter users spotted it.

According to several first-hand reports, Facebook users were seeing a button asking "Does this post contain hate speech?" on all of their News Feed posts, along with options to select "Yes" or "No."

Some users also reported being shown a reminder that "If someone is in immediate danger, call local emergency services. Don't wait."

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The hate speech dialog box even showed up on posts from the creator of Facebook himself, Mark Zuckerberg. It turns out that he, too, was subject to the judgment of the masses.

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While we can't say for sure, this feature may very well be one of the many new features the social network is getting ready to unveil at its annual F8 developer conference, which begins later today. We expect to see a number of announcements related to News Feed, which Facebook is constantly tinkering with.

We also expect augmented and virtual reality to play a central role in the conference, as well as updates to Messenger and Workplace, Facebook's connectivity projects such as Internet.org, and M, Facebook's virtual assistant.

We've reached out to Facebook for comment on this unusual hate speech dialog box, and will update this article when we hear back.