Facebook and Instagram removed more than 20 million pieces of content containing COVID-19 disinformation, but they couldn’t say how often these sorts of false claims are on the platforms.
The social network tracks the prevalence of other sorts of material, such as hate speech and adult nudity, to get a sense of what objectionable messages were overlooked. According to the firm, providing this statistic for COVID-19 misleading is more complicated.
“When it comes to COVID, though, things are evolving even more quickly so it does make prevalence even more difficult to define and measure,” said Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, during a press conference on Wednesday.
Politicians, including US Vice President Joe Biden, and advocacy organizations have blasted social media platforms for failing to effectively prevent the spread of COVID-19 and vaccination disinformation. Facebook collaborates with fact-checkers, leads users to reputable sources, and identifies disinformation. However, experts have questioned how successful these procedures are in preventing the spread of misleading claims on the internet.
“There will always be examples of things we missed, and, with a scale of our enforcement, there will be examples of things that we take down by mistake,” Rosen said. “There is no perfect here.”
Facebook stated that it has over 65 criteria for misleading statements concerning COVID-19 and vaccinations that will cause it to delete postings from its platforms. The business has added to this list erroneous claims that COVID-19 vaccinations cause Alzheimer’s disease and that being around vaccinated persons may induce secondary adverse effects in others.
The social network stated that it has deleted over 3,000 accounts, pages, and groups for breaching its COVID-19 and vaccination policies. It has also shown warnings on more than 190 million pieces of COVID-related information that fact-checkers evaluated on Facebook, and these postings appear lower in people’s News Feeds.
