Social media platforms have been increasing their content moderation efforts amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. This week, Facebook announced that they will begin warning users if they liked, reacted or commented on posts that are deemed to be “misinformation.”
In a blog post announcing the new measures, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, said that they will be sourcing the World Health Organization as the arbiter of truth, and will be downranking content that deviates from the organization’s current guidelines. The website will be using an army of 60 different fact-checking organizations to make sure that posts in your timeline reflect what the WHO is saying.
“Ever since COVID-19 was declared a global public health emergency in January, we’ve been working to connect people to accurate information from health experts and keep harmful misinformation about COVID-19 from spreading on our apps. We’ve now directed over 2 billion people to resources from the WHO and other health authorities through our COVID-19 Information Center and pop-ups on Facebook and Instagram with over 350 million people clicking through to learn more. But connecting people to credible information is only half the challenge. Stopping the spread of misinformation and harmful content about COVID-19 on our apps is also critically important,” the post read.
However, the World Health Organization’s guidance since the beginning of the outbreak has been heavily criticized around the world, because the group appeared to have drug their feet in announcing a pandemic, and initially backed up claims by the Chinese government that there was no evidence on the virus spreading between humans. In fact, the organization has also come under fire for its response to previous outbreaks, as the New York Times noted.
The company says that they have already removed hundreds of thousands of posts that they determined were misinformation that “could lead to physical harm.”
“We’re going to start showing messages in News Feed to people who have liked, reacted or commented on harmful misinformation about COVID-19 that we have since removed. These messages will connect people to COVID-19 myths debunked by the WHO including ones we’ve removed from our platform for leading to imminent physical harm. We want to connect people who may have interacted with harmful misinformation about the virus with the truth from authoritative sources in case they see or hear these claims again off of Facebook. People will start seeing these messages in the coming weeks,” the statement continued.
The post also announced a $1 million grant for international fact checking organizations.
Clearly the massive censorship has begun to drive so many people off their platforms that it is becoming less effective. It's reaching fewer people because there are fewer people to reach using Fakebook. It will also be interesting to be able to gain more data about the algorithms they employ to determine what is misinformation, as simply deleting posts leaves a smaller footprint to analyze than posting warnings will.
Facts are clearly not the basis for their objections to content, since what they are protecting is false. Ascertaining exactly what they are protecting will enable determining their purpose, which will forewarn us and that will be very useful indeed.
Thanks!
That is great news - just as youtub has driven everyone to Bitchute, fakebook can drive more users to Hive!
Go for it suckaturd...
Facebook’s New Censorship Czar Pamela Karlan once described herself as a “snarky, bisexual, Jewish women” and has been described as a “full-throated, unapologetic liberal torchbearer.”
Sounds like a perfect fit!
You just pass a wonder message, love this
Facebook and Ytube , the 1984 telescreen's ...
We must break that screen and leave it fast .
Scary. More than censorship.