Facebook still providing safe spaces for COVID misinformers
Someone somewhere introduced the theory that a COVID-19 vaccine will alter the DNA of anyone unwise enough to receive it. Did that person know this to be a crock and put it out there just for the fun of it?
Or did they genuinely believe the rumor was rooted in reality and think that, by sharing their knowledge, they were doing an important service for humankind?
Either way, the ridiculousness will surely put a lot of people at higher risk for contracting COVID. That’s because vaccine-caused DNA damage and many other myths involving the novel coronavirus have themselves gone viral.
For that the world has internet culture to thank. Or blame. One could start with Big Social Media and go from there.
The media watchdog NewsGuard has done just that once again, this time floodlighting 34 “super-spreader” Facebook pages that are succeeding at propagating nonsense about, specifically, COVID vaccines.
Posting its findings Oct. 29, the team noted that this subset of pages had collectively scored more than 14.1 million Likes as of a couple days prior.
At the top of their list is a page called WorldTruth.TV, for example. This page’s disservices have included pushing out 125 separate posts of an article asserting that a COVID vaccine would use microchip implants to help drive a global tracking system. The page contains an email address. When NewsGuard used it to ask the page’s operator for comments, no reply came back.
Unanswered questions are something of a theme in the report.
“For most of the false or misleading posts that we identified, Facebook did not provide any warning, fact-checking language or links to more credible sources,” the report authors write. “Five out of 69 posts reviewed by NewsGuard as of October 26 did have notices from third-party fact-checking organizations. However, some claims that did receive fact-checking notices did not carry any warnings when they were made by other Facebook pages or in different news stories.”
Meanwhile eight of the Facebook pages in the new report are repeat offenders.
These eight super-spreaders “have continued to share misinformation to their substantial audiences,” the authors write. “In fact, three of these sites have seen an increase in page Likes since NewsGuard’s earlier report, published in April 2020.”
NewsGuard has posted both the April report and the new one in full for free.
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.