Facebook recently released a content transparency report but did not make public the most viewed post by users in the United States for the last quarter. Facebook apparently buried a similar report for the first quarter of this year because the company feared that it would have made the social media giant look bad. Facebook feared that it would tarnish the image of the company for the way it handled the spread of Covid-19 related misinformation on its platform. After facing criticism, the social media giant released the initially shelved report. As per the report, the most-watched post on the platform was a link to the story that suggested a Florida doctor’s death would be related to the Covid-19 vaccine. The story link, which has been since updated, was the most viewed link during the first quarter of 2021. Reacting to criticism faced for not making the report public, Facebook policy communications manager Andy Stone said that it ‘wasn’t unfair.’ However, he tried to explain the complexities involved in handling such information. “New outlets published articles about the death of a Florida doctor.
Initially, it was suspected that the death was caused due the Covid-19 vaccine. But later when the exact cause of death was released by the coroner, those news websites attached an update to the original story. However, there were some who did not update the story. In such a case, would it have been right to pull down the story link because the information shared in it was not right? Of course not. No one actually suggested this and neither am I. This simply demonstrates how complicated it is to handle misinformation and what is even more difficult is to define misinformation,” Stone said in a tweet. Stone said that the report for the first quarter was withheld as there were some key fixes to the system that Facebook wanted to make. But he did not explain what those updates were. When Facebook released a report on August 18, there was information about most-viewed content in its public News Feed during the second quarter. Apparently, this was intended to present a rosier picture of the company.
Facebook’s second-quarter reports showed that the most viewed post during the period was a word puzzle that asked readers to pick out the first three words that they saw. According to the report, the second most viewed post during this period was the one that asked users who were above 30 years to post a picture of themselves if they looked young. The most viewed links on the social media platform during the second quarter of 2021 were a GIF of kittens and a response page of UNICEF that addressed the topic of the coronavirus crisis in India. There is still no clarity on why Facebook shared information related to most viewed content at all. But Facebook and other social media platforms have been facing criticism over the way they handled misinformation related to Covid-19 vaccines on their platforms. And it is mounting of late. Biden administration has already asked Facebook and other social media platforms to handle misinformation related to the coronavirus in a better way. Another possible reason behind Facebook announcing the new ‘transparency’ reports is that the company was irritated with the compilation of the list of top-performing US Facebook pages by a journalist.
