On Facebook, health misinformation ‘superspreaders’ run into billions of views: report

(Reuters) – Misleading health content has garnered an estimated 3.8 billion views on Facebook Inc. (FB.O) in the past year, peaking during the COVID-19 pandemic, lawyer group Avaaz said in a new report here on Wednesday.

The report found that content from 10 “superspreader” sites that share misinformation about health had nearly four times as many Facebook views in April 2020 as equivalent content from the pages of 10 leading health organizations, such as the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The social media giant, which has been under pressure to curb misinformation on its platform, has made amplifying credible health information a key element of its response. It also began removing false information about the outbreak of the new coronavirus that it said could cause severe damage.

“Facebook’s algorithm is a major threat to public health. Mark Zuckerberg promised to provide reliable information during the pandemic, but his algorithm sabotages those efforts by spreading many of Facebook’s 2.7 billion users to networks with health information, ‘said Fadi Quran, campaign director at Avaaz.

“We share Avaaz’s goal of correcting misinformation, but its findings do not reflect the steps we have taken to prevent it from spreading to our services,” said a Facebook company spokeswoman.

“Thanks to our worldwide network of fact-checkers, from April to June, we affixed warning labels on 98 million pieces of COVID-19 misinformation and removed 7 million pieces of content that could lead to imminent damage. “We have targeted more than 2 billion people at health authority sources and if anyone tries to share a link about COVID-19, we will show them a pop-up to link them to credible health information,” she said.

Avaaz’s report also said that warning labels of fact checks were inconsistently applied, even when incorrect information was found to be false.

The report followed how content from a sample of websites with incorrect information was shared on Facebook by interpreting available Facebook data between May 2019 and May 2020.