When Facebook released its first quarterly report on the most popular posts in the United States this week, Guy Rosen, vice president of sincerity, said on social media: “The Internet is the most transparent platform. ”The list shows that the most accessible posts were unclean content such as recipes and cute animals.
Facebook produced a similar report in the first three months of the year, but executives did not share it with the public because it seemed bad for the company.
In that report, the copy was given to the Times, and the most visible link was a news article with the caption that a coronavirus vaccine was found guilty by a Florida doctor. The Facebook page of the anti-China newspaper The Epoch Times, which disseminates right-wing conspiracy theories, is the 19th most popular forum in the first three months of 2021.
The report was made public when some executives, including Facebook Analytics vice president and chief marketing officer Alex Schultz, argued that it could cause problems for public relations. The company decided to sell.
Facebook spokeswoman Andy Stone said: “We had planned to release the report earlier, but because we knew it would be interesting, as we saw this week, there were system repairs that we wanted to do.
Facebook did not say why it had decided to publish the popularity report, but said it had launched an extensive investigation into information it shared with the government and the public about the virus and vaccines. Criticism has intensified as more and more coronavirus cases have emerged from the Colonial Delta. The White House called on the company to share more information about false and misleading information on the site and to do better to stop the spread. Last month, President Biden accused the company of “killing people” by allowing the company to spread false information, a White House statement later said. Other federal agencies have accused Facebook of blocking key information.
Facebook has pushed the White House to sue the company over its failure to meet its immunization goals. Facebook executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have said that Covi-19 has been eliminating false information since the outbreak began. The company claims to have removed more than 18 million inaccuracies during that time.
But there are many reasons why Brian Bolland, former vice president of Facebook marketing, is skeptical of information collected and released by a company with a history of self-interest.
“You can’t believe a report designed by a company to fight the press narrative,” said Mr. Bolland. It is up to regulators and government officials to bring that transparency to us.
In this week’s report, which covers the public view on the Facebook news feed from April 1 to June 30, popular links include local news stories, a cat GIF and Green Bay Packers website. Popular posts on tens of millions of accounts include viral question and answer questions and memories.
Most of the company’s draft report, as released by Facebook on Wednesday, shows that the 20 most viewed links on Facebook in the United States have non-political content, such as UN Children’s Fund recipes and stories.
But the rejected report also included an article about the doctor’s death in Florida. The headline was published two weeks after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, a “healthy” doctor from the South Florida Sun Center and the Chicago Tribune. CDC is investigating why.
This link has been viewed by some 54 million Facebook accounts in the United States. In the post, many commentators raised questions about the safety of the vaccines. According to CrowdTangle, a Facebook-based social media analytics company, six of the top 20 shareholders come from public Facebook pages that regularly post anti-vaccine content on Facebook. Other key figures in the story cited Philippine Facebook pages in support of Israeli pro-President Rodrigo Duterte and “self-proclaimed truth even in the absence of the media.”
Months later, the medical examiner reported that there was insufficient evidence to suggest that the vaccine contributed to the doctor’s death. Few people on Facebook have seen that update.
In a previous report, the 19th most popular page on social media was the “Trends of the World” in the Epic Times, promoting QAnon’s conspiracy theory and spreading misleading claims about voter fraud before the 2020 presidential election. Epoc Times has been banned from advertising on Facebook due to repeated violations of the forum’s political advertising policy.
According to the report, Trending World had 81.4 million views, slightly less than Fox News, the 18th most popular page with 81.7 million viewers in the first three months of 2021.
A Facebook report released Wednesday shows that the US Epic Times subscription link is one of the most viewed in the United States. In April, May, and June, 44.2 million accounts were linked, almost half as popular as Trending World.
Canvas fringe Contributed. James Silver And Ben Decker Contributed.