Last week, Facebook launched its first “widely viewed content” report, a doc that basically was the corporate’s response to quite a few stories that probably the most participating content material on the platform often comes from polarizing and probably deceptive conservative figures and retailers, together with Newsmax, Fox News, Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino. The report final week contradicted that, saying that in Q2 of 2021, prime domains included extra innocuous content material coming from YouTube, Amazon, TikTok and a cat GIF from Tumblr.
But on Friday, the New York Times revealed a report saying that it had seen a “widely viewed content” report for Q1 of 2021 and that it confirmed totally different tendencies. For instance, the most-viewed hyperlink was a narrative claiming a Florida physician died from the coronovirus vaccine. Facebook has now confirmed the doc’s accuracy and released it directly.
Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone took to Twitter to get into the main points of the report and stated that Facebook withheld the report as a result of “there were key fixes to the system we wanted to make,” however he did not elaborate on what these fixes are.
On the query of the unreleased report from earlier this yr and why we held it. We ended up holding it as a result of there have been key fixes to the system we wished to make.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) August 21, 2021
Stone additionally did a deep dive into the deceptive story that got here out of Florida, making an attempt to clarify Facebook’s choices round it. “News retailers wrote in regards to the south Florida physician that died. When the coroner launched a reason behind dying, the Chicago Tribune appended an replace to its authentic story; NYTimes didn’t,” he wrote on Twitter. “Would it have been proper to take away the Times story as a result of it was COVID misinfo? Of course not. No one is definitely suggesting this and neither am I. But it does illustrate simply how troublesome it’s to outline misinformation.”
As famous by the New York Times, Facebook has been making an attempt to counter stress across the issues shared on its platform, particularly relating to misinformation round COVID-19 and its vaccine. Much of that stress is coming instantly from the US authorities. President Biden memorably stated final month that Facebook was “killing people” with vaccine misinformation on its web site, although he walked again his statements barely later.
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