Health misinformation rampant on Facebook: US based non-profit group

NEW DELHI: Health misinformation was rampant on Facebook last year, according to a new study by US-based non-profit group Avaaz.
“Global health misinformation spreading networks spanning at least five countries (UK, US, Germany, France and Italy) generated an estimated 3.8 billion views on Facebook in the last year,” the report stated.
The type of misinformation that went viral included claims like "Bill Gates backed a polio vaccination that led to the paralysis of half a million children in India." Some also promoted bogus cures for diseases like colloidal silver for Ebola.
In a statement shared with TOI, Facebook said the study was "limited" and "did not reflect the steps we’ve taken to keep it from spreading on our services."
"Thanks to our global network of fact-checkers, from April to June, we applied warning labels to 98 million pieces of COVID-19 misinformation and removed 7 million pieces of content that could lead to imminent harm. We've directed over 2 billion people to resources from health authorities and when someone tries to share a link about COVID-19, we show them a pop-up to connect them with credible health information," said a Facebook spokesperson.
Founded in 2007, Awaaz is a US-based non-profit organisation which promotes global activism. According to Avaaz, they identified 42 Facebook pages and 82 websites shared on the platform that form a "global health misinformation spreading networks". "...The networks identified generated content reaching more than 130 million interactions, equivalent to 3.8 billion estimated views on Facebook, between May 28, 2019 and May 27, 2020," the report stated.
It also warned that the views that these websites garnered "peaked at an estimated 460 million views on Facebook in April 2020," just as the global pandemic was escalating around the world.
Researchers also compared to the views generated by these networks with the ones that provide credible health information, including the World Health Organisation (WHO) and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), over the same period. "We found that on Facebook, the content from the top 10 websites spreading health misinformation generated almost four times as many views as equivalent content from the top 10 websites of leading health institutions," the report added.
The research also added that "only 16% of all health misinformation analysed had a warning label from Facebook," which meant that "despite their content being fact-checked, the other 84% of articles and posts sampled in this report remain online without warnings."