A post that cast doubt on the covid-19 vaccine was the platform’s most viewed link in the first quarter of 2021.
After facing widespread criticism, Facebook has unveiled a transparency report that it initially shelved about the most popular posts on its public News Feed in the U.S. during the first quarter of 2021. The report offers a glimpse into how far misinformation about the covid-19 vaccine has spread online. As first reported by the New York Times, which published a bombshell expose on Friday after obtaining a copy of the then-unreleased report, the most-viewed link on Facebook between January and March was a since-updated news article suggesting that the vaccine may be at fault for a Florida doctor’s death. The link racked up nearly 54 million views during this period. According to Facebook’s report, among the top 20 most visited pages on the platform during the first quarter was the Epoch Times, a site that routinely pushes misinformation about the covid-19 pandemic and far-right conspiracies such as QAnon. On Saturday, Facebook policy communications director Andy Stone tweeted that the criticism Facebook has faced for initially holding the report “wasn’t unfair,” but added that defining misinformation is a complex process: Stone said that Facebook didn’t release the report earlier because there were “key fixes to the system” that the company wanted to make.
