Facebook and Google blitz on Covid untruths

Tech giants including Facebook and Google have removed hundreds of thousands of posts spreading misinformation about Covid-19.

Tech giants including Facebook and Google have removed hundreds of thousands of posts spreading misinformation about Covid-19.

At a Senate committee hearing on Friday into foreign interference through social media, Facebook’s head of public policy Australia, Josh Machin, confirmed it has teams focused on removing both misinformation and disinformation relating to the pandemic and Covid-19 vaccines.

In Australia Facebook has removed 110,000 pieces of harmful Covid-19 misinformation alone.

“Since the beginning of the pandemic we’ve removed harmful misinformation claims about Covid – 18 million posts (worldwide) along those lines, we’ve worked with 80 fact checkers around the world where we refer material to them,” Mr Machin said. “There are 167 million posts that we’ve applied a false label after fact checkers have looked at them … we’ve also been trying to direct people to credible and authoritative sources of information.

“We’ve built a Covid information centre and we’ve been directly prompting Facebook and Instagram users to visit, 2 billion people around the world have visited that centre since the pandemic began.”

Facebook set up the Covid-19 information centre to provide regularly updated information, including case number updates in Australia and globally, facts about the pandemic and prevention tips.

Google’s director of government affairs and public policy in Australia and New Zealand, Lucinda Longcroft, also confirmed it had removed 800,000 videos from YouTube that spread misinformation relating to the pandemic.

The Department of Home Affairs said it had contacted social media platforms about 1735 pieces of Covid-19-related misinformation on their sites.

Google’s director of law enforcement and information security, Richard Salgado, said it had seen plenty of problematic Covid-19 content including some “that comes out of China”.

He said the tech giants work “swiftly” to “remove offending content from their platforms and terminate the actor’s account”.

During the hearing there were extensive discussions on how elections can be impacted by social media – Twitter’s director of public policy in Australia and New Zealand, Kara Hinesley, said it had made “substantial changes” to policies that prioritise tackling misinformation during election campaigns. She also said the social media giant was the only site of its kind that did not allow political advertising.