Facebook revealed yesterday that it has remove more than one billion fake accounts to counter misinformation and specifically about covid-19.
On Monday, a post on the Facebook Newsroom reported that about 1,3 billion fake Facebook accounts. The company employs over 35.000 people working to address misinformation on its platform.
Facebook says that since the beginning of the pandemic, it has used AI systems to detect hate speech and comments and has deleted posts that contain misinformation.
As a result, more than 12 million publications on COVID-19 and vaccines have been removed.
Guy Rosen, a spokesman for Facebook, wrote that "misinformation can also be posted by individuals, even in good faith." Not everyone publishes misinformation with malicious intent. They may want to help people, but they do not know that the information they are sharing is actually untrue.
To meet this challenge, Rosen writes that Facebook has created a global network of more than 80 independent information controllers who control content in more than 60 languages.
"When they rate something as fake, we reduce its distribution so that fewer people see it and add a warning label with more information to anyone who sees it. (…) For the most serious types of misinformation, such as false allegations about COVID-19 and vaccines and content intended to suppress the vote, we remove the content.
In addition to removing misleading or false information, Facebook has also created some special websites for users to find reliable information from trusted experts. Examples include pages for COVID-19, climate and vote in the US in 2020. "
The first time Facebook took action against misinformation was in August 2020, when it removed 7 million posts with COVID-19 misinformation. This led to the termination of some Russian disinformation networks, as well as the downgrading of posts that contained false claims about elections of USA the 2020.
But Facebook is not the only social media platform to deal with the rise of fake news. Recently, Twitter began banning users who constantly post misinformation about COVID-19. Even TikTok removed more than 300.000 videos with misinformation about the US election.
Although the boundaries between misinformation and usage control are often blurred, Facebook and every platform has every right to use the terms you have accepted when you sign up. It is just a private company with social effects. Any protest for lack of freedom is rather utopian since anyone who uses the social media platform has agreed to these conditions. Otherwise he can set up a site and write whatever he wants.
From the reader's point of view, make sure that the information you receive daily comes from a reliable source or that you consider it a reliable source. Even better, we suggest you check the new stories you read before commenting on them.
