The social networking site “Facebook” revealed its most popular links among its users in the United States of America, in the period from January to March 2021.
And “Facebook” indicated that the link that mentions that the (Covid-19) vaccine may be fatal was the most common during the first 3 months of this year, according to a report issued by the social media giant, on Saturday, which identified the most popular content on the platform. From January to March.
Facebook was subjected to severe scrutiny this year due to false information about the “Covid-19” disease that was shared on its platform, as US President Joe Biden said, earlier this year, that “Facebook is killing people,” and then retracted the comments at a time later.
Earlier this week, Facebook released a report identifying popular content from April to June 2021, raising questions about why data was not released for the first quarter of the year.
The top performing links mentioned in the Q2 2021 report were mostly non-harmful content, such as sports, recipes, and animals.
But last Friday, The New York Times reported that the first-quarter report was intentionally withheld by Facebook’s top executives for fear of a backlash.
And the report of the first quarter of 2021, which was issued the day after the “New York Times” report, showed that the most popular link on “Facebook” was an article published by the “Sun Sentinel” newspaper and distributed by the “Chicago Tribune”, and its title was that the (Covid-19) vaccine may be It caused the death of a Florida doctor two weeks after being vaccinated.
But the medical examiner’s report on the doctor’s body later found that there was not enough evidence to determine whether the vaccine played a role in his death, and an update was added to the story to refute what I had previously published.
The Sun Sentinel article was read by more than 53 million people in their Facebook newsfeed.
Facebook’s Q1 2021 report also stated that the 19th most popular page on the platform in the first three months of 2021 belonged to The Epoch Time, a right-wing anti-China newspaper that promoted conspiracy theories.
A Facebook spokesperson, Andy Stone, said, via his Twitter account, that the article talking about a Florida doctor who died as a result of receiving the Corona virus vaccine, which was factually accurate, “illustrates how difficult it is to identify misinformation.”
Of course not. No one is actually suggesting this and neither am I. But it does illustrate just how difficult it is to define misinformation.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) August 21, 2021
The report, issued on Saturday, indicated that the top 20 most popular links on the Facebook account combined, compared to only 0.057% of content views on the platform, which hosts more than 2.8 billion monthly users.
Facebook confirmed that it plans to continue releasing quarterly reports on the platform’s most popular content as part of its efforts to achieve transparency.