Facebook will notify users who have liked, commented, or reacted to coronavirus misinformation and guide them to WHO resources
Facebook will begin informing people who have engaged with coronavirus misinformation on its main Facebook app, the company announced Thursday.
AxiosSara Fischer
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third step in Facebook's escalating COVID-19 information push. In early March, Mark Zuckerberg laid out the company's response — free ads for the WHO, misinfo flagging, and health-organization support (Zuckerberg's March response) — followed days later by a COVID-19 information center pinned atop every user's feed.
First-order effects
Users who have liked, commented on, or reacted to debunked coronavirus claims will now receive a notification pointing them to WHO resources — turning past engagement itself into a correction surface rather than leaving it buried.
The WHO gains a distribution channel inside Facebook's app at no cost, extending the free-ad arrangement Facebook offered health organizations earlier in the month.
Second-order effects
Rival platforms face pressure to match engagement-based retroactive notifications, since removal-and-labeling alone no longer reads as sufficient action during a public-health crisis.
If the pattern holds, retroactive correction of individual users' past engagement becomes a baseline expectation for social platforms — shifting misinformation policy from content-level labels to user-level accountability loops that regulators can audit.
The approach also exposes a structural gap: notification depends on detection, so platforms remain bottlenecked by how much misinformation their reviewers and classifiers actually catch before engagement happens.
The trend: Social platforms are evolving from labeling or removing misinformation to proactively notifying users about their own past engagement with it, making correction a standing product feature rather than a one-off crisis measure.
New updates on our work to limit COVID-19 misinformation and connect people to reliable information: we've now directed over 2B people to health authority resources through our COVID-19 Info Center and pop-ups with >350M people clicking to learn more. https://about.fb.com/... 1/
There's no doubt coronavirus misinformation is still going viral, esp in languages other than English - but never been clear corrections would stop that Avaaz commissioned a study to look into this. The results are quite striking https://secure.avaaz.org/... https://twitter.com/.…
https://secure.avaaz.org/... Damning report by @Avaaz on Facebook's failure to combat virus misinformation effectively - “It can take up to 22 days for the platform to downgrade and issue warning labels on false content”
@sarafischer @jackshafer I mean the news media is most likely seriously compromised by the CCP. And after Epstein, anyone who trusts them is ignorant or daft. You add them beclowning themselves with the difference between Kavanaugh and Biden... that's just gasoline on the fire.
If this data becomes available for research it should help to understand the depth and spread of disinformation through Facebook's mysterious ways ↘️ https://twitter.com/...
Here's Facebook's statement. “We want to connect people who may have interacted with harmful misinformation about the virus with the truth from authoritative sources in case they see or hear these claims again off of Facebook” https://about.fb.com/...
Our fact-checking partners have ramped up efforts to fight COVID-19 misinformation, and we're excited to share more about the impact of this work. In March, we displayed warnings on about 40 million posts related to COVID-19 on Facebook, based on around 4,000 fact-check articles.…
In the month of March, FB displayed warnings on about 40 million posts related to COVID-19, based on around 4,000 articles by independent fact-checking partners. When people saw those warning labels, 95% of the time they did not view the original content. https://about.fb.com/...
Facebook will show a message in the News Feed to people who have liked, reacted or commented on harmful misinformation about COVID-19. These messages will connect people to COVID-19 myths debunked by the WHO https://about.fb.com/...
Facebook typically doesn't inform users if they've engage in debunked content, aside from Russian disinformation a while back. My thought bubble: Once it starts doing this, it will be expected moving forward they do this for all kinds of misinformation, including political. https…
Facebook adds TWO new features to tackle #Coronavirus misinformation 1/ Informing people who interacted with harmful #COVID19 misinfo about authoritative sources 2/ New ‘Get the Facts’ section in FB's #covid19 Info Center to show fact-checked articles https://about.fb.com/... htt…