As the coronavirus pandemic has raged across the United States, misinformation about vaccines and other health topics has been viewed an estimated 3.8 billion times on Facebook - four times more than authoritative content from institutions such as the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to a study by the left-leaning global human rights group Avaaz.
"In the midst of a global health crisis and presidential election cycle, this report is useful because it adds to a growing list of evidence showing how the majority of problematic content is missed by tech companies' moderation systems, and therefore further amplified" by their algorithms, said Jonathan Albright, director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, whose research has also used Facebook's reporting...
And yet, throughout the pandemic, Facebook's systems have failed to catch viral misinformation. For example, a documentary called"Plandemic," which claimed that wearing a mask can cause people to develop covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, was shared millions of times before it was removed.For example, the group pointed to an article that falsely claimed that the American Medical Association was"encouraging" doctors to overcount deaths from covid-19.
More than a third of Americans say they won't get a coronavirus vaccine when one is developed, according to a recent Gallup poll.