White House dispute exposes Facebook blind site for misinformation

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“The suggestion not to allocate resources to combating disinformation in Covid and supporting the rollout of a vaccine is not supported by the facts,” said Danny Lever, a Facebook spokeswoman. “With no standard definition of vaccine misinformation, and with false and even correct content (often shared by mainstream media) potentially discouraging vaccine acceptance, we are focused on outcomes — measuring whether people using Facebook accept Covid-19 vaccines. “

Facebook executives, including its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have said the company has been committed to removing misinformation about Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. The company said it has removed more than 18 million pieces of misinformation about Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.

Experts who study disinformation said the number of clips Facebook removed wasn’t as helpful as the number of articles uploaded to the site, or in which groups and pages people saw the spread of misinformation.

“They need to open the black box of content curation and content amplification intent. Take this black box and open it up for scrutiny by independent researchers and the government,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Combating Digital Hate, a non-profit organization that aims to combat disinformation. We don’t know how many Americans have been infected with the misinformation.”

Ahmed’s group, using publicly available data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned program, found that 12 people were responsible for 65 percent of misinformation about Covid-19 on Facebook. The White House, including Mr. Biden, reiterated that number last week. Facebook says it doesn’t agree with the “dozen misinformation” characterization, adding that some of their pages and accounts have been removed, while others are no longer posting content that violates Facebook’s rules.

Renee DiResta, a disinformation researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, called on Facebook to publish more accurate data, which would allow experts to understand how false claims about a vaccine affect certain communities within the country. The information, known as “prevalence data,” mainly looks at the prevalence of a narrative, such as the percentage of people in a community who view a service.

“The reason why more accurate prevalence data is needed is because false claims do not spread across all audiences equally,” DiResta said. “In order to effectively address the specific false claims that communities see, civil society organizations and researchers need to better understand what is happening within those groups.”

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