Social Media giant, Facebook will show alerts to people who have previously interacted with misinformation about coronavirus in a bid to tackle the spread of false information about the pandemic.
The message, which will appear as an alert in users’ News Feed, will be shown to anyone who has liked, reacted or commented on “harmful misinformation about COVID-19”, the company announced.
In a statement, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the alert would cover “misinformation related to COVID-19 that we’ve since removed” and connect users with “accurate information”.
Facebook says it has removed “hundreds of thousands of pieces of COVID-19-related misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm”, thanks to a combination of automated detection and work by third party fact checkers.
According to Mr Zuckerberg, in March the company “displayed warnings on about 40 million posts related to COVID-19, based on 4,000 articles reviewed by independent fact-checkers”.
When people saw those warning labels, Mr Zuckerberg said “95% of the time they did not go on to view the original content”.
