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Last week, in an attempt to quash accusations that it had been prioritizing misinformation, Facebook released a ‘Widely Viewed Content’ report detailing the top posts viewed in the US over the past three months.
However, a new rumor has emerged that the social media platform skipped the Q1 2021 results, over fears that the data could harm the site’s reputation.
According to a report by The New York Times, it appears that internal emails from Alex Schultz, Facebook’s Chief Marketing Officer, and other executives showed that there were debates over the release of the earlier report.
Allegedly, the most-viewed link on the site in Q1 was a news article from The South Floridan Sun Sentinel, republished by The Chicago Tribune, that had the headline: “A ‘healthy’ doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID-19 vaccine; CDC is investigating why.”
A far-right media outlet, The Epoch Times, was also listed as the 19th-most popular page on the platform.
With more lawmakers hitting back at Facebook for being a hotbed of misinformation and alt-right rhetoric, could the social media site have hidden the Q1 results so as to prevent it from drawing more flack?
Recently, as per CNET, the Biden administration also reached out to Facebook, asking the platform to do more to combat COVID-19 misinformation that could lead users to opt out of the vaccine.
Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said the site “considered making the report public earlier, but since we knew the attention it would garner, exactly as we saw this week, there were fixes to the system we wanted to make.”
While executives at Facebook have said the new reports are a bid to promote “transparency” to the larger community, some people still aren’t buying it.
Former Vice-President of Product Marketing at the company, Brian Boland, said the report “fails to deliver on the transparency it promises,” as limitations set on the data renders it “useless.”
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