facebook warns staff growth decelerate vaccine

#FACEBOOK WARNS STAFF GROWTH DECELERATE VACCINE FREE#

“One flag from UNICEF was the disparity between FB and IG,” one comment on the report stated, “where they said this: ‘One of the ways we manage these scenarios on Instagram is though pinning top comments. “The aggregate risk from in comments may be higher than that from posts, and yet we have under-invested in preventing hesitancy in comments compared to our investment in content,” another March 2021 report stated.

#FACEBOOK WARNS STAFF GROWTH DECELERATE VACCINE FREE#

One of the March 2021 internal reports noted that the rate of vaccine hesitancy comments was so high on Facebook posts “that authoritative health actors, like UNICEF and the WHO, will not use free ad spend we are providing to them to promote pro-vaccine content, because they do not want to encourage the anti-vaccine commenters that swarm their Pages.”įacebook employees were concerned that while the company’s AI systems were trained to detect misinformation in posts, the same wasn’t true for comments, which may be more likely to have vaccine-hesitant content, documents show. He added that the company planned to give the WHO “as many free ads as they need for their coronavirus response along with other in-kind support,” and would give “millions more in ad credits” to other authoritative organizations, too.īut a flood of comments raising questions and illegitimate concerns about vaccines on the platform meant that, in some cases, those organizations didn’t want to take advantage of that free help. “So we’re removing false claims and conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organizations.” “As our community standards make clear, it’s not okay to share something that puts people in danger,” Zuckerberg wrote. But the company was already grappling with the spread of misinformation and myths about Covid-19. Approved vaccines were still months away. At the time, there were only around 90,000 recorded cases globally and about 3,100 known deaths, most of them in China.

The organization called on big tech firms to give it a direct line to flag posts on their platforms that could harm people’s health.ĬEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook on March 3, 2020, that his company was working with the WHO and other leading health organizations to help promote accurate information about the virus. The World Health Organization (WHO) began describing Covid-19 misinformation as an “infodemic” in the early stages of the pandemic last year, amid a flood of social media posts on conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus, dangerous advice about faulty treatments and unreliable reports on vaccines. The big takeaways from the Facebook Papers (Photo by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images) Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images A consortium of news organizations, including CNN, has reviewed the redacted versions received by Congress.Ī giant digital sign is seen at Facebook's corporate headquarters campus in Menlo Park, California, on October 23, 2019. The documents were included as part of disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. “Our ability to detect vaccine hesitancy comments is bad in English and basically non-existent elsewhere,” one of the March 2021 reports stated.

“Our internal systems are not yet identifying, demoting and/or removing anti-vaccine comments often enough,” the report pointed out.Īdditional reports a month later raised concerns about the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy - which in some cases may amount to misinformation - in comments, which employees said Facebook’s systems were less equipped to moderate than posts. “We have no idea about the scale of the problem when it comes to comments,” an internal research report posted to Facebook’s internal site in February 2021, a year into the pandemic, noted. (FB) documents suggest a disconnect between what the company has said publicly about its overall response to Covid-19 misinformation and some of its employees’ findings concerning the issue. In doing so, it claimed that “more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the internet.” In public, Facebook has touted the resources it has dedicated to tackling Covid-19 and vaccine misinformation, even scolding US President Joe Biden for his harsh criticism of the company’s handling of the issue.

Facebook warns staff growth decelerate vaccine