New Report shows that Facebook is failing to combat false claims about COVID-19 on the platform.
A recent investigation by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), shows that Facebook is not fulfilling its commitment to counter false claims on the platform. In fact, an international pressure group that spreads conspiratorial claims about Covid-19 more than doubled the average number of interactions it got on Facebook in the first six months of 2021. The ISD also found serious limitations to Facebook’s fact-checking programme that relies on third party organizations to label misleading claims, especially when it comes to content in languages other than English. The ISD’s review of the 50 most popular posts mentioning the international pressure group spreading false claims revealed that only 13% of English-language posts containing false or misleading content carried a factcheck label. In other languages, the share was even lower: 8% of German posts, 5% of Spanish posts and just 2% of Arabic posts.