(Newswire.net— April 24, 2020) — Facebook users who have read, viewed, or shared false content about the corona virus have been warned about a great deal of fake news as part of an attempt by the company to combat the spread of misinformation, BBC reports.
The new alert system is a reaction to what the World Health Organization calls the “infodemia” around COVID-19.
An independent study found that this platform “lies at the epicenter of misinformation about the Coronavirus” and that the social network is more vulnerable in some languages than others.
Facebook says this research does not reflect the work that the company has recently done.
This California-based tech firm states that it will “start displaying alerts at the top of its news feeds” in the coming weeks. The messages will direct people to the World Health Organization’s webpage where myths regarding the pandemic are debunked.
A Facebook spokesman said that people who may have seen harmful misinformation about the virus will be linked to the truth from official sources, should they see or hear those claims again on Facebook.
The change was prompted by a major study of misinformation on this platform in six different languages by Avaaz, an activist group that is funded through crowdfunding. Researchers say millions of Facebook users are still exposed to misinformation about the coronavirus, without any warning from the platform itself.
The group found that some of the most dangerous false claims received hundreds of thousands of reviews, including claims such as “black people are resistant to coronavirus” and “Coronavirus is destroyed by chlorine dioxide”.
Avaaz researchers analyzed a sample of more than 100 false information threads of the virus’s misinformation on Facebook in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Italian and French versions of the site.
On the English version of the site, the research showed 29 percent of false content was in no way flagged as misleading or misleading.
The situation is worse in some other languages: 70% content in Spanish, 68% in Italian, and 50% of Portuguese misinformation content were not flagged as false. Arabic efforts are slightly more successful, with only 22% of the unmarked posts being misleading.
Facebook claims that it continues to expand its multilingual network of partners by issuing grants and working with trusted organizations in more than 50 languages.
AFadi 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.”