Facebook’s Biden defence lacks key data on spread of Covid lies

While Facebook was much better at labelling and fact checking disinformation than Google’s YouTube and Twitter, according to Avaaz, its sheer size means it still generated more user interactions on posts that slipped through the company’s fact checking apparatus. — Reuters

When US President Joe Biden said Friday that social networks like Facebook are “killing people” with the viral spread of Covid-19 misinformation, the company tried to defend itself. In a strongly-worded blog post, an executive attempted to redirect people to more positive data, on the ways Facebook has spread good information.

But that didn’t address the critique. While it’s impossible to say whether misinformation on Facebook is actually “killing people”, and Biden walked back his comments on Monday, the problem Biden was flagging is real: Covid-19 misinformation is a big issue on Facebook, and one that hasn’t been fixed. Only Facebook knows how big.