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> During the pandemic we’ve removed 18 million pieces of harmful misinformation about Covid-19 and worked with 80 fact-checking organizations to label over 167m

> During the pandemic we’ve removed 18 million pieces of harmful misinformation about Covid-19 and worked with 80 fact-checking organizations to label over 167m posts as false. Almost certainly this count includes people referencing actual treatments of the Covid-19 disease like ivermectin, going so far as to ban links to congressional testimony by the likes of Dr. Cory, an MD actually treating covid patients, and references to NIH connections to the Wuhan lab, lab leak allegations, etc. We know now there was insider incentive to much of the censorship. See the Fauci email dump, specifically emails from Jan 31,2020 to about Feb 4. Also recent news report in the Daily Mail, et al. that Google provided funding to the Eco Health Alliance. Lastly I will say lumping concerns about the various SARS-cov2 vaccines with the usual suspects in the traditional anti-vax crowd is disingenuous.

notahacker 5y ago
> Lastly I will say lumping concerns about the various SARS-cov2 vaccines with the usual suspects in the traditional anti-vax crowd is disingenuous. You're responding to an article whose most dramatic claim is that a full two thirds of what they consider to be online COVID misinformation came from just 12 individuals. Extremely motivated individuals or not, that does tend to suggest the organization is letting a lot of more mainstream speculation slide. Still the accounts are named, as are their backgrounds in peddling vitamin supplements and antivax literature and some examples of their posts about Bill Gates and microchips, medical industry plans to create chronically ill patients and the Pfizer vaccine killing more people than Covid. If you're going to call others "disingenuous" for "lumping these concerns in with the usual anti-vax crowd", perhaps you would like to tell us which one of the twelve accused individuals you believe is actually making reasoned arguments about testing procedures or possible evidence of side effects associated with some of these vaccines?
- jackfoxy 5y ago
  Did these 12 account for all or the bulk of 18 million pieces of information, and the bulk of anti-covid-vax postings? That is the lumping together I'm talking about.
  - notahacker 5y ago
    One of the CCDH's criticisms of Facebook's internal analysis is that apparently they counted shares as discrete "pieces of information", never mind paraphrases. The "dirty dozen" highlighted producing 65% of the content CCDH class as antivax have a combined 59 million social followers and are extremely prolific. So if nothing else, we can be sure that [by Facebook's metrics] there's a lot more than 18m obvious "pieces of misinformation" by any reasonable standard posted to Facebook over that timeline. Of course it's not totally impossible Facebook's review process is so bad that they focused all their efforts on suppressing mainstream news stories about blood clots and people wondering whether they should still take it if they'd had adverse reactions to vaccines in the past. Certainly nobody would argue Facebook is perfect, but with the quantity of actual ludicrous antivax content out there clearly being greater than what they removed, it would have to be extraordinarily bad to have primarily targeted standard concerns. And that in itself would be worthy of discussion (and again CCDH specifically question whether Facebook's algorithms are adequate to distinguish between individual and organized vaccine hesitancy..)

notahacker 5y ago

> Lastly I will say lumping concerns about the various SARS-cov2 vaccines with the usual suspects in the traditional anti-vax crowd is disingenuous. You're responding to an article whose most dramatic claim is that a full two thirds of what they consider to be online COVID misinformation came from just 12 individuals. Extremely motivated individuals or not, that does tend to suggest the organization is letting a lot of more mainstream speculation slide. Still the accounts are named, as are their backgrounds in peddling vitamin supplements and antivax literature and some examples of their posts about Bill Gates and microchips, medical industry plans to create chronically ill patients and the Pfizer vaccine killing more people than Covid. If you're going to call others "disingenuous" for "lumping these concerns in with the usual anti-vax crowd", perhaps you would like to tell us which one of the twelve accused individuals you believe is actually making reasoned arguments about testing procedures or possible evidence of side effects associated with some of these vaccines?

jackfoxy 5y ago
Did these 12 account for all or the bulk of 18 million pieces of information, and the bulk of anti-covid-vax postings? That is the lumping together I'm talking about.
- notahacker 5y ago
  One of the CCDH's criticisms of Facebook's internal analysis is that apparently they counted shares as discrete "pieces of information", never mind paraphrases. The "dirty dozen" highlighted producing 65% of the content CCDH class as antivax have a combined 59 million social followers and are extremely prolific. So if nothing else, we can be sure that [by Facebook's metrics] there's a lot more than 18m obvious "pieces of misinformation" by any reasonable standard posted to Facebook over that timeline. Of course it's not totally impossible Facebook's review process is so bad that they focused all their efforts on suppressing mainstream news stories about blood clots and people wondering whether they should still take it if they'd had adverse reactions to vaccines in the past. Certainly nobody would argue Facebook is perfect, but with the quantity of actual ludicrous antivax content out there clearly being greater than what they removed, it would have to be extraordinarily bad to have primarily targeted standard concerns. And that in itself would be worthy of discussion (and again CCDH specifically question whether Facebook's algorithms are adequate to distinguish between individual and organized vaccine hesitancy..)