Facebook’s reputation for presenting us with factual health information took a big hit today thanks to a new report compiled by activist group Avaaz. It concludes that the social network counts as “a major threat to public health.”
As part of its research, Avaaz discovered “global health misinformation spreading networks” had generated roughly 3.8 billion views for their content on Facebook. The peak of this misinformation occurred in April, when an estimated 460 million Facebook views were logged. Worryingly, the top 10 websites spreading health misinformation achieved “four times as many estimated views” on the social network as the top 10 leading health institutions.
Back in April, Facebook said it was going to notify users who liked or reacted to harmful coronavirus misninformation. However, Avaaz found that Facebook is failing to place warning labels next to health misninformation, suggesting it doesn’t actually have a clear view on how much misinformation is available on its network. 84 percent of the articles/posts Avaaz used in its samples did not show a warning. And just 42 Facebook pages classed as “key drivers of engagement” for the top health misinformation spreading websites enjoy 28 million followers and around 800 million views.
As the BBC reports, Facebook is pushing back against the reports. In a statement the company said, “We share Avaaz’s goal of limiting misinformation. Thanks to our global network of fact-checkers, from April to June, we applied warning labels to 98 million pieces of Covid-19 misinformation and removed seven million pieces of content that could lead to imminent harm … We’ve directed over two billion people to resources from health authorities and when someone tries to share a link about Covid-19, we show them a pop-up to connect them with credible health information.”
Avaaz does present a two-step solution Facebook could use to “quarantine this infodemic” and reduce misinformation by almost 50 percent. The first step involves providing every Facebook user who has seen misinformation with “independently fact-checked corrections.” The second step is termed “detox the algorithm,” and asks Facebook to downgrade misinformation posts and actors in News Feeds.
