Facebook publishes transparency report on top posts

After facing a lot of criticism, Facebook unveiled a transparency report that it initially shelved the most popular posts from its public news feed in the United States during the first quarter of 2021. Report provides insight into the extent of misinformation about the covid-19 vaccine in line.

As first reported by The New York Times, which published a bomb expose On Friday, after obtaining a copy of the then unpublished report, the most viewed link on Facebook between January and March was a since-updated news article suggesting the vaccine could be responsible for the death of a Florida doctor. The link has accumulated almost 54 million views during this period.

According to the Facebook report, among the platform’s 20 most-visited pages in the first quarter was The Epoch Times, a site that regularly spreads misinformation about the covid-19 pandemic and far-right conspiracies such than QAnon.

Facebook director of political communications Andy Stone on Saturday tweeted that the criticisms Facebook faced for initially holding the report “were not unfair,” but added that defining disinformation is a complex process:

“The media wrote about the South Florida doctor who died. When the coroner published a cause of death, the Chicago Tribune added an update to its original story; NYTimes didn’t. Would it have been right to delete the story from The Times because it was COVID [misinformation]? Of course not. Nobody suggests it and neither am I. But it illustrates how difficult it is to define disinformation.

Stone said Facebook didn’t release the report earlier because there were “key system fixes” the company wanted to make. He did not go into more detail on the exact nature of these changes, but was published a link to the report on Twitter. In a statement to the Washington Post, he said a change involved fixing a technical bug but declined to develop further.

At Twitter, Stone pointed out “slight differences” between this pending report and the second quarter report Facebook made released earlier this week, adding that Facebook hopes to see even more progress in the third quarter. Facebook released its second quarter report on August 18 showing the most popular posts in the United States from April through June, which puts the company in a more flattering light. The Epoch Times is still popping up, with its subscription page ranking in the top 10 most viewed links, but most of the top performing articles involved memes, recipes, heartwarming animal stories, and for some reason. showcases of CBD products and Christianity. -themed clothing.

However, whatever “key fixes” Facebook made between the two reports, they are not immediately clear. Comparing them side by side, their formats are almost identical. Facebook uses different word choices to explain its findings, but its presentation of the data itself remains unchanged. Facebook did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

It seems the only reason this first report ever saw the light of day was the backlash from Facebook patting its back for transparency with the second report while burying a data set that made it look bad. Namely, Facebook Vice President Guy Rosen introduced the social network as “by far the most transparent platform on the Internet” in a statement to the post office earlier this week.

“We are guilty of cleaning up our house a bit before we invited from the company,” Stone wrote on Twitter. “We have been criticized for it; and again, that’s not unfair … given the interest in the first draft of the report that we didn’t release, we decided to just make it public. It does not shine, but we are trying to improve.