About one in three people in the United States, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, Argentina, and South Korea say they have seen false or misleading information related to the coronavirus pandemic on social media, according to a new report.
The new study, by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, comes as Facebook announced on Thursday that it will tell millions of its users if they saw online posts containing misinformation connected to the pandemic in an attempt to curb the spread of false news.
The study showed that 33% of those in the U.S. said they had seen “a lot” or “a great deal” of false or misleading information on social media platforms.
Over 40% of the coronavirus-related misinformation on Facebook, for example, had already been debunked by partners of Facebook’s own fact-checking program, yet remained on the platform, according to a report by Avaaz, an international group that organizes demonstrations for progressive causes.
Avaaz said that such fake social media posts about the coronavirus had been shared, collectively, 1.7 million times on Facebook, in six languages. The posts were on everything pandemic-related, ranging from false medical remedies for the virus to claims that minority groups were less susceptible to becoming infected.
Facebook said Thursday that besides its new step of informing people who have seen coronavirus misinformation on its platform, it already points users to information from credible health organizations and pins government public health warnings to the top of people’s news feeds.
“Through this crisis, one of my top priorities is making sure that you see accurate and authoritative information across all of our apps,” Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, wrote on his Facebook page.
