Coronavirus: Facebook alters virus policy after damning misinformation report

Facebook is changing how it treats Covid-19 misinformation after a damning report into its handling of the virus.

Users who have read, watched or shared false coronavirus content will receive a pop-up alert urging them to go the World Health Organisation's website.

A study had indicated Facebook was frequently failing to clamp down on false posts, particularly when they were in languages other than English.

Facebook said the research did not reflect the work it had done recently.

The California tech firm says it will start showing the messages at the top of news feeds "in the coming weeks".

Truth redirect
The messages will direct people to a World Health Organisation webpage where myths are debunked.

A Facebook spokesman said the move will "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".

The changes have been prompted by a major study of misinformation on the platform across six languages by Avaaz, a crowdfunded activist group.

Researchers say millions of Facebook users continue to be exposed to coronavirus misinformation, without any warning on the platform.

The group found some of the most dangerous falsehoods had received hundreds of thousands of views, including claims like "black people are resistant to coronavirus" and "Coronavirus is destroyed by chlorine dioxide".

Avaaz researchers analysed a sample of more than 100 pieces of Facebook coronavirus misinformation on the website's English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Italian and French versions.

The research found that:

It can take the company up to 22 days to issue warning labels for coronavirus misinformation, with delays even when Facebook partners had flagged the harmful content for the platform.
29% of false content in the sample was not labelled at all on the English language version of the website
It is worse in some other languages, with 68% of Italian-language content, 70% of Spanish-language content, and 50% of Portuguese-language content not labelled as false
Facebook's Arabic language efforts are more successful, with only 22% of the sample of misleading posts remaining unlabelled.
Facebook says it is continuing to expand its multilingual network of fact-checkers issuing grants and partnering with trusted organisations in more than 50 languages.

Fadi Quran, Campaign Director at Avaaz said: "Facebook sits at the epicenter of the misinformation crisis.

"But the company is turning a critical corner today to clean up this toxic information ecosystem, becoming the first social media platform to alert all users who have been exposed to coronavirus misinformation, and directing them to life-saving facts."