Shares in the social media platform Facebook plummeted 19 per cent wiping out $US120b from it's market cap.

A strange Facebook search glitch has some critics branding the platform “abusive”.

Its search bar lets you track down pictures of your female friends, but not your male ones.

The bizarre find was made by notorious Belgian “ethical” hacker Inti De Ceukelaire, reports The Sun.

He found that if you type “photos of my female friends” into the search tool, Facebook throws up pictures of the girls you’re connected with on the site.

But if you type “photos of my male friends”, it shows seemingly random photos from Facebook pages you aren’t connected with.

News Corp can confirm it works across several Facebook accounts.

Facebook will also brazenly ask if you meant to type “female”, assuming you mistyped your query.

Mr De Ceukelaire flagged the strange glitch on Twitter earlier in the week, but it still worked as of Thursday.

He said: “Facebook has modified their creepy hidden search feature this weekend.

“You can no longer retrieve hidden photos from your male friends. Women can/may still be stalked.”

To make matters worse, if you type “photos of my female friends” into the search bar, Facebook gives an auto-completed list of even creepier queries.

These include “photos of my female friends in bikinis”, and “photos of my female friends at the beach”.

Fortunately, the searches only show random photos from pages you are not connected with.

When you type “photos of my male friends” into search, no auto-complete suggestions appear.

One Twitter user commented: “Type in ‘photos of my female’ and you get additional search suggestions that will violate women’s privacy.

“These are abusive search suggestions and should be addressed”.

Facebook has not yet commented on the reports.

Facebook has battled a year of scandals over the past 12 months.

Last month, it emerged that the tech giant was paying children $28 a month to install a “spying app” that monitored everything they did.

A huge Facebook security breach in October handed hackers access to 50 million profiles including posts, photos and messages.

And in one of the weirdest stories of the year so far, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey claimed last month that Mark Zuckerberg once fed him cold goat that the Facebook founder had killed himself with a “laser gun”.

This story was originally published in The Sun and is reprinted with permission.