A post on the Facebook Newsroom declared that 1.3 billion fake Facebook accounts were taken down between October and December 2020. The company had over 35,000 workers to combat misinformation on its platform.
The social media platform stated that since the beginning of the pandemic, it has used its hate detecting AI system in duo with the response from global health experts to delete posts containing misinformation.
More than 12 million posts concerning Covid19 and vaccines have been discarded. Guy Rosen, Facebook’s VP of integrity, writes that “misinformation can also be posted by people, even in good faith.” Not everyone posts misinformation with intentions of spreading negativity, they could be wanting to help people, but are oblivious that the information they are sharing is false.
To address this issue, the social media VP of integrity stated that, the platform has built a global network of over 80 independent fact-checker to examine content in more than 60 languages:
Facebook has enabled devoted online spaces for users to find credible information from trusted experts. For example, covid19, climate science, and US voting 2020.
In August 2020 the media platform took action and abolished 7 million posts with Covid19 misinformation. This lead to the shutdown of a number of Russian misinformation networks, and having to demote post that may contain inaccurate claims concerning the election.
However, Facebook is not the only social media platform to deal with the increase of fake news. Twitter started prohibiting users that continuously post covid19 misinformation, TikTok also eliminates over 3000,000 videos with election misinformation. Ensure that information gin take in every day is from a reliable source