FB was teeming with anti-vax content as it scrambled to weed it out: Report
NEW DELHI: Anti-vaccine propaganda was rampant on Facebook even when the company tried to specifically address the problem, a new report has said citing internal memos at the social media company.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced a plan to use the company to push millions of people towards Covid-19 vaccines by amplifying authoritative sources.
But, beginning before his announcement in March, the social media service was already a hotbed of anti-vaccine information, at one point even drawing a public rebuke from US President Joe Biden later in the summer, the report said.
The memo cited by the WSJ concluded that roughly 41% of comments on English-language vaccine-related posts risked discouraging vaccinations since users were seeing comments on vaccine-related posts 775 million times a day - a large part of which were sceptical.
Even authoritative sources of vaccine information were becoming “cesspools of anti-vaccine comments”, the memo’s authors wrote, according to the WSJ.
The WSJ said the company’s own findings demonstrate the scale of the problem at Facebook and its inability to address these even when it set out to. Comments, posts and videos are hard to control, given how the company has built its platforms.
The company’s efforts suffered from technical limitations, the WSJ added, citing an integrity staffer who said a post with 53,000 reshares and three million views was not taken down automatically because Facebook’s systems mistakenly thought it was written in Romanian.
Even when they worked as intended, the systems used to detect vaccine posts for removal or demotion weren’t built to work on comments, the documents show.
Employees improvised, and by late February, two Facebook data scientists came up with a way to scan for what they called “vaccine hesitant” comments.
A Facebook spokesperson cited by the WSJ said: “We’re focused on outcomes, and the data shows that for people in the US on Facebook, vaccine hesitancy has declined by about 50% since January, and acceptance is high”.
The report also cited Facebook’s efforts to reduce the spread of health misinformation by changing the way it ranked health-related content. The efforts led to a reduction of what the company called “health misinfo” in posts between 6.7% and 9.9%, according to a June 2020 memo.
In August 2020, the WSJ added, a report by advocacy group Avaaz concluded that the top 10 producers of “health misinfo” were garnering almost four times as many estimated views on Facebook as the top 10 sources of authoritative information.