The most popular link seen on Facebook earlier this year was an article suggesting that a Florida doctor may have died from a coronavirus vaccine, according to a new report from the social media giant amid growing concerns that Facebook allows the spread of COVID-19 misinformation. .
The article, which garnered more than 53.8 million views between Jan. 1 and March 31, suggested the doctor’s death was “possibly the country’s first vaccine-related death.”
The article originally appeared on the South Florida Sun Sentinel in January and was widely shared by the Chicago Tribune on Facebook. The story was updated after the role of the vaccine in the death of the 56-year-old man was considered unfinished by a forensic doctor.
The article’s massive popularity was revealed in a first-quarter “Content Transparency Report” shared publicly on Saturday by Facebook spokesman Andy Stone after the New York Times reported that the document had been quietly kept out of concerns that it would make the company look bad.
Earlier in the week, Facebook posted a separate set of findings, “Report Highly Viewed Content: What People See on Facebook,” covering content from April 1 to June 30. This report, which lists much more harmless content at the top of the popularity charts, had been labeled a first-quarter report, according to the Times, but now says “Q2 2021” at the top.
Stone shared a link to an “internal copy” of the content transparency report that was not disclosed on Twitter. He said the findings of this report had not been published before because “there were key solutions to the system we wanted to do.”
“We are guilty of cleaning our house a little before inviting the company. We have been criticized for this; and again, that’s not unfair. ” Stone tweeted on Saturday. He did not go into details about the “corrections” that allegedly led to the retention of the report, although a Facebook source told HuffPost that the problems involved “errors in some of the queries.” The source did not immediately respond to a request for more details.
When asked about the apparent discrepancy in the description of the various reports as first and second quarter, Stone told HuffPost on Sunday that the “Most Viewed Content Report” published on August 18 covers the second quarter of the year, but the first “inaugural” report published.
San Francisco Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images via Getty Images The popularity on Facebook of a skeptical news article about the vaccine was revealed in a data report amid concerns that the company would allow misinformation of COVID-19. However, there are questions about the data.
When Facebook unveiled its “Most Viewed Content Report” last week, the company said it did so because “transparency is an important part of everything we do on Facebook.”
“Our goal is to provide clarity about what people see in your Facebook news feed, the different types of content that appear in your feed, and the domains, links, pages, and posts most viewed on the platform during the quarter.” said the company.
However, skepticism remains about the accuracy of public data, including former Facebook employees.
“You can’t rely on a report curated by a company and designed to combat a press narrative instead of real, meaningful transparency,” Brian Boland, Facebook’s former vice president of product marketing, told the Times. “It’s up to regulators and government officials to provide us with that transparency.”
Another former Facebook employee, who spoke anonymously with the Washington Post over a low-waste clause, compared the company’s report to “ExxonMobil publishes its own study on climate change.”
You can’t rely on a report curated by a company and designed to combat a press narrative rather than significant real transparency.
Brian Boland, former vice president of Facebook product marketing
“It’s something to counteract independent research and media coverage that tells a different story,” the former worker said.
There have been growing concerns about the spread of vaccine misinformation on social media platforms, with President Joe Biden last month going so far as to say that social media companies “kill people”.
“Here we are dealing with a death or death issue, so everyone has a role to play in making sure there is accurate information,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in July. . “They are a private sector company. They will make decisions about any further action they may take. It is clear that more can be taken.
Facebook has repeatedly pledged to take more action against vaccine information, but critics and skeptics have said the company’s efforts have not gone far enough and have called for independent access to user activity data. .
“It’s defensible for Facebook to want to protect the data of an everyday person,” Rachel Moran, a researcher studying COVID-19 social media misinformation at the University of Washington, told Recode. “But in trying to really understand how much misinformation there is on Facebook and how it interacts every day, we need to know more.”
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, whose office has described health misinformation as a threat to the country’s COVID-19 response, has also warned of a crucial lack of data from social media companies.
“The data gap means we want to be blind,” Murthy told Recode earlier this month. “We do not know the extent of the problem. We don’t know what works to fix the problem. We do not know who has affected the problem the most. “
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