Facebook still “superspreads” COVID-19 falsehoods

Facebook has been outed as a “superspreader” of COVID-19 misinformation despite its attestations it is doing the right thing.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Picture: AFP

Facebook has been outed as a “superspreader” of COVID-19 misinformation despite its attestations it is doing the right thing.

NewsGuard, which supplies a plug-in for classifying the reliability of news sites, says it has identified 15 Facebook Pages with huge Facebook audiences that are peddling false and dangerous information to more than 18 million users.

“Combined, these accounts reach 18,691,792 followers,” says NewsGuard in a blogpost, adding “We plan to add more pages to this data set as we continue our research.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post on April 16 says Facebook and Instagram are directing more than two billion people to authoritative health resources via its COVID-19 Information Centre and educational pop-ups, with more than 350 million people clicking through to learn more.

“We’re also continuing our efforts to reduce misinformation. Since the beginning of March, we’ve expanded our fact-checking coverage to more than a dozen new countries and now work with over 60 fact-checking organisations that review content in more than 50 languages.

“If a piece of content contains harmful misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm, then we’ll take it down. We’ve taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19, including theories like drinking bleach cures the virus or that physical distancing is ineffective at preventing the disease from spreading.”

However NewsGuard says Facebook’s actions were falling short of its rhetoric.

“We also found that in a majority of the false posts we reviewed, Facebook did not provide any warning, fact-checking language, or links to more credible sources — despite the platform’s recent promises to do so.

“Of the posts we have identified so far publishing COVID-19 misinformation, 63 per cent did not have any warning or fact-check link attached to the post.

“In some cases, multiple posts that asserted the same myth were treated differently, with certain posts flagged by Facebook’s fact-checkers and others left alone. It did not appear that the fact-checker warnings were more common for posts with high engagement or pages with high follower counts. Whether or not a fact check was shown appeared to be random.”

Misinformation cited by NewsGuard includes reports that connect 5G technology to the spread of COVID-19 (a claim that has been traced to Russian media), reports detailing false treatments such as effective treatment with vitamin C, silver and the drug hydroxychloroquine having a 100 per cent success rate.

There are claims that Bill and Melinda Gates funded a group with “a patent” to the virus and were now funding a vaccine.

There are links to an Iranian propaganda outlet that says the virus was created in a lab as a bioweapon, a link to a Russian outlet that reports that the US military started the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sites include Global Informers, Energy Therapy, The Farmacy, REALfarmacy.com, The Truth About Cancer, Waking Times, Health Impact News, and The Gateway Pundit.

NewsGuard says that where Facebook does offer fact checking, it’s often too late.

“Even for the posts that did have fact-checker warnings, those warnings would only have appeared after the hoax had been published.

“That lapse is exacerbated by Facebook’s policy of not providing information to its users that Facebook Pages like these have been known to publish misinformation or hoaxes in the past.”