Social networking giant Facebook attempting to perform its best with always announcing steps to combat the issue of widespread misinformation on its platform. However, a new report by Avaaz has claimed that Facebook has generated an estimated 3.8 million view of health misinformation.
In fact, the report asserts that in April alone, the health views hit at roughly 460 million. This is exactly the identical month when Facebook was pushing trusted information throughout the COVID-19 information centre, points out the report.
The analysis by Avaaz monitored the perspectives of the 82 wellbeing misinformation dispersing sites on Facebook month by month between May 28, 2019, and May 27, 2024, and also in its findings found that total projected viewpoints surfaced on the platform in April 2024.
As per the report, the algorithm of the platform is “helping boost content from health misinformation spreading websites in a staggering rate.” This is due to the fact that the report indicates on Facebook, the content in the top 10 websites spreading health misinformation made nearly four times as many views as equivalent content in the top 10 websites of major health associations.
To evaluate Facebook’s answer to misinformation content dispersing on its platform, the report also analyzed a sample group of 174 parts of health misinformation; Avaaz found that only 16% of these had a warning tag from Facebook, whereas another 84% remained on the platform without fact-check tags, despite their own content being fact-checked.
Facebook has denied all these allegations of never taking appropriate steps to curb the misinformation. Responding to this report, a Facebook spokesperson said, “We discuss Avaaz’s aim of restricting misinformation; however their findings do not reflect the steps we’ve taken to keep it from spreading on our solutions.
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Thanks to our global system of fact-checkers, from April to June, we applied warning labels to 98 million pieces of COVID-19 misinformation and removed 7 million pieces of content which could cause imminent harm. We’ve directed more than 2 billion people to sources from health authorities and when someone attempts to talk about a connection in COVID-19, we reveal them a pop-up to link them with credible health advice”
