Sat 04 September 2021:
According to a research by New York University and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, misinformation on Facebook received six times the number of likes, shares, and interactions as factual news organizations, according to The Washington Post.
The study looked at articles from trusted news sources including the World Health Organization and CNN, as well as ones from news publishers notorious for spreading false information. They looked at posts from August 2020 to January 2021 on Facebook.
Both political parties were influenced by the “misinformation surge,” according to the study. The study also discovered that conservative news producers were more likely to spread false material than publications from other political groups.
Ever since “fake news” on Facebook became a public concern following the 2016 presidential election, publishers who traffic in misinformation have been repeatedly shown to be able to gain major audiences on the platform. But the NYU study is one of the few comprehensive attempts to measure and isolate the misinformation effect across a wide group of publishers on Facebook, experts said, and its conclusions support the criticism that Facebook’s platform rewards publishers that put out misleading accounts.
In response to the study’s findings, Facebook stated that the report only included the number of individuals who interacted with the posts, not the number of people that viewed them, which is known as impressions. According to the Washington Post, Facebook does make impression data available to researchers.
“This report looks mostly at how people engage with content, which should not be confused with how many people actually see it on Facebook,” said Joe Osborne, a spokesperson for Facebook. “When you look at the content that gets the most reach across Facebook, it is not at all like what this study suggests.”
Mr. Osborne said that the company has 80 fact-checking partners who examine posts in more than 60 languages and work to label and reduce the distribution of false information.
President Joe Biden criticized Facebook and other social media sites for allowing COVID-19 vaccination misinformation to propagate on their platforms, claiming that this has resulted in the deaths of Americans.
When asked at a July press conference what his message to platforms like Facebook regarding COVID-19 disinformation was, President Biden said: “I mean they really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that’s — they’re killing people.”
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