The revelation has raised questions on Facebook’s role in helping to curb the spread of misinformation about the global pandemic that has infected over 22 million people and altered lifestyles across the world.

NEW DELHI — Misinformation about coronavirus was viewed on Facebook as many as 3.8 billion times—four times more than the credible information from genuine organisations such as WHO.

Avaaz, a global human rights group, also revealed that the pages which peddled misinformation invited more views during the pandemic than before. The articles that were identified as ‘misleading’ by Facebook’s own third-party fact-checkers were inconsistently labelled. About 84% of the posts in the research sample were left online without any warning labels.

Avaaz also found that certain pages acted as “super spreaders” of misinformation about the novel coronavirus. “The 42 pages that Avaaz identified as super spreaders collectively have 28 million followers and their content generated an estimated 800 million views. Many of the spreaders include groups that have a long history of opposing vaccination,” said a report in The Washington Post.

This happened despite the Facebook policy to weed out dangerous misinformation about coronavirus.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg had pledged to provide better health information to 3 billion users about the coronavirus disease. Just when WHO declared the coronavirus disease (covid-19) as a global pandemic, the company launched a banner on top of the app to promulgate information from authoritative sources.

But Facebook failed to arrest the spread of misinformation. Posts opposing the use of masks were viewed a million times before they were taken down.

The revelation has raised questions on Facebook’s role in helping to curb the spread of misinformation about the global pandemic that has infected over 22 million people and altered lifestyles across the world.

The report lends credence to the claims of critics that social media companies cannot curb the spread of fake information.

In response to Avaaz’s findings, The Washington Post quoted Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone as saying: “We share Avaaz’s goal of limiting misinformation, but their findings don’t 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.