"But how many people have viewed the misinformation? Is it more than 18 million? Is it less than 18 million?" King asked. "And Facebook is being blamed for that."
"I understand what you're saying," Zuckerberg said. "The number that I have off the top of my head that I can share is the number of pieces of misinformation that we've taken action against."
Once again, Facebook ends up with egg on its face after a single question from a journalist. Its effort sounds good in principle, but it doesn't take much to peer inside Zuckerberg's statements and find more tap-dancing with the facts.
What's more, while there's no question that 18 million posts is a lot, we've seen an awful lot of innocent posts get censored because Facebook algorithms can't tell the difference between objectionable content and reasonable content that contains similar words. (Similarly, Facebook algorithms have trouble finding offensive photos. Once they though a cow’s head was a human head, for example!)
Facebook's efforts are typically like someone trying to do surgery in a pair of mittens.
Let's hope 18 million deleted posts is enough to put COVID19 misinformation to bed.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-covid-misinformation-post/
Photo: "I hate you COVID" by Matthew Almon Roth is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
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