Facebook and elected officials biggest sources of coronavirus disinformation, journalists claim
An engineer from the Israeli company "Commun.it" uses his expertise in social media commercial analysis to identify networks of fake users during at the group's office in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv on January 23, 2019
Journalists covering COVID-19 pandemic claim that Facebook is the biggest spreader of disinformation, followed by elected officials.
An international survey of journalism and COVID-19 conducted by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University shed light on false information.
Facebook recently updated its hate speech policy, effectively banning all content which denies or distorts the Holocaust. Earlier, Zuckerberg had denied appeals to do the same.
The researchers found that 66 per cent journalists associated Facebook with fake news, and called it the primary source of “prolific disinformation”.
82 per cent journalists part of the study claimed to have reported misinformation to Facebook, and its corollary platforms WhatsApp and Instagram. Out of these, almost half claimed that they were dissatisfied with the company’s response.
The survey also looked at disinformation spread on Twitter, Youtube, and Google search. The project began in April 2020 to ascertain the correlation between coronavirus and journalism.
Half of the journalists from the US, UK, India, Nigeria, and Brazil claimed politicians and elected officials remained the second top source of false information regarding COVID-19, after social media.
In August, findings claimed that websites spreading misinformation about COVID-19 garnered half a billion views on Facebook in the month of April, when COVID-19 was spreading ferociously throughout the world.