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When Facebook released its first quarterly report on the most viewed posts in the United States this week, Guy Rosen, vice president of integrity, said the social network has embarked on a “long journey” to become by far the most transparent platform. the internet.” The list showed that the posts with the most reach tended to be harmless content like recipes and cute animals.
Facebook had produced a similar report for the first three months of the year, but executives never made it public because of concerns it would look bad for the company, according to internal emails sent by executives and shared with The New York Times.
In this story, a copy of which was given to The Times, the most viewed link was a headline suggesting that the coronavirus vaccine was defective in the death of a doctor in Florida. The report also includes a Facebook page. Age TimesAn anti-China newspaper spreading right-wing conspiracy theories, it was the 19th most popular page on the platform in the first three months of 2021.
The report was about to be made public, according to internal emails, as some executives, including Facebook’s vice president of analytics and vice president of marketing, Alex Schultz, were discussing whether this would cause a public relations issue. The company decided to shelve.
“We considered making the report public earlier, but as we saw this week, there were fixes we wanted to make to the system because we knew it would draw attention,” said Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone.
Facebook didn’t say why it decided to produce a popularity report, but the data it shares with the government and the public has faced increasing scrutiny, particularly due to misinformation about the virus and vaccines. As cases from the Delta variant of the coronavirus increased, so did the criticism. There is the White House urged the company to share more information about false and misleading information on the site and do a better job of stopping its spread. President Biden company last month”killing people“By allowing misinformation to circulate widely, a statement the White House later softened. Other federal agencies have accused Facebook of withholding important data.
Facebook backed out, accusing the White House of scapegoating the company for failing to meet administration’s vaccination goals. Executives at Facebook, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, said the platform has aggressively removed Covid-19 misinformation since the start of the pandemic. The company said it removed more than 18 million misinformation during this period.
But Brian Boland, Facebook’s former vice president of product marketing, said there are many reasons to be skeptical about data collected and published by a company with a history of protecting its own interests.
“You can’t rely on a report curated by a company and designed to combat a press narrative rather than any truly meaningful transparency,” Mr. Boland said. “It’s up to regulators and government officials to bring us that transparency.”
Covering public content viewed on Facebook’s News Feed from April 1 to June 30, this week’s report included local news, a cat GIF, and the Green Bay Packers alumni website, among popular links. Popular posts seen by tens of millions of accounts included viral Q&A prompts and memes.
Much of the company’s draft report, as Facebook released Wednesday, showed that the top 20 most viewed links on Facebook in the United States were non-political content, such as recipe sites and stories about the United Nations Children’s Fund.
However, the rejected report also included an article about the doctor’s death in Florida. Title of article republished by The Chicago Tribune of The South Florida Sun Sentinel: “A ‘healthy’ doctor died two weeks after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine; The CDC is investigating the cause.”
This link has been viewed by approximately 54 million Facebook accounts in the United States. Many commenters on the post raised questions about the safety of the vaccines. According to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics firm, six of the 20 top postings came from public Facebook pages that regularly post anti-vaccine content on Facebook. Among those that shared the news the most were Filipino Facebook pages supporting President Rodrigo Duterte, a pro-Israel Facebook group, and a page called “Facts Only”, which describes itself as “putting out the Truth even if the media don’t.”
Months later, the medical examination report said there was not enough evidence to say whether the vaccine contributed to the doctor’s death. Far fewer people on Facebook have seen this update.
In the previous report, the 19th most popular page on the social network was “Trenched World” by the Epoch Times, a post that promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory and spread misleading allegations about voter fraud ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Epoch Times Banned from advertising on Facebook due to the platform’s repeated violations of its political advertising policy.
According to the report, Trending World was viewed by 81.4 million accounts, slightly less than Fox News, the 18th most popular page with 81.7 million content viewers in the first three months of 2021.
Facebook’s transparency report, released Wednesday, also showed that the Epoch Times subscription link was among the most viewed in the United States. It was about half as popular as Trend World in the shelved report, with around 44.2 million accounts seeing the link in April, May, and June.
Sheera Frenkel contributing reporting. Jacob Silver and Ben Decker contributed to research.
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