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“The suggestion that we haven’t dedicated resources to tackling Covid misinformation and supporting vaccine rollout is just not supported by the facts,” said Dani Lever, a Facebook spokesperson. . “Without a standard definition of vaccine misinformation, and with both false and even true content (often shared by mainstream media) potentially discouraging vaccine acceptance, we focus on outcomes – measuring whether people who use Facebook accept Covid-19 vaccines. “
Facebook executives, including its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have said the company has been committed to eliminating disinformation about Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. The company said it has removed more than 18 million misinformation about Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.
Experts who study disinformation said the number of items Facebook deleted was not as informative as the number of items uploaded to the site or to which groups and pages people were seeing the spread of disinformation.
“They need to open the black box that is their architecture for ranking and amplifying content. Take this black box and open it for audit by independent researchers and the government, ”said Imran Ahmed, managing director of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that aims to fight disinformation. “We don’t know how many Americans have been infected with disinformation.”
Mr Ahmed’s group, using publicly available data from CrowdTangle, a program owned by Facebook, discovered that 12 people were responsible for 65% of the Covid-19 disinformation on Facebook. The White House, including Mr Biden, repeated that figure last week. Facebook says it disagrees with the characterization of the “disinformation dozen,” adding that some of their pages and accounts have been deleted, while others no longer post content that violates the rules. Facebook.
Renée DiResta, disinformation researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, called on Facebook to release more granular data, which would allow experts to understand how false vaccine claims were affecting specific communities within the country. The information, known as “prevalence data,” essentially examines the extent of a story, such as the percentage of people in a community on the service who see it.
“The reason more granular prevalence data is needed is that false claims do not spread equally among all audiences,” Ms. DiResta said. “In order to effectively counter the specific false claims that communities see, civil society organizations and researchers need a better idea of what is going on within these groups.”
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