How much COVID misinformation is on Facebook? Its execs don?t want to know

Falsehoods, misrepresentations, and outright lies posted on the site have shaped the discourse on everything from national politics to public health.But despite their role in facilitating communications for billions of people, Facebook executives refused to commit resources to understand the extent to which COVID-19-related misinformation pervaded its platform, according to a report in The New York Times.Early in the pandemic, a group of data scientists at Facebook met with executives to propose a project that would determine how many users saw misleading or false information about COVID. That’s about 40,000 pieces of content per day.Facebook’s unwillingness or inability to understand the scope of COVID misinformation on its platform was apparent in comments it gave to The New York Times, in which it blamed its nescience on the lack of a “standard definition” for pandemic-related misinformation.