Facebook warns its users about Coronavirus fake news.

Eating garlic protects against coronavirus. Covid-19 was invented from scratch by China. The outbreak is a consequence of the deployment of 5G. From this Thursday, Facebook users who have "liked", reacted or commented since March on the countless "fake news" related to the coronavirus will receive on their "news feed" an alert message referring to the site of the World Health Organization (WHO).

This is the first time that a social network - and the largest in the world, with more than 2 billion users - has adopted such a retroactive mechanism, available in all languages. According to the international NGO Avaaz, which campaigned for Facebook to move in this direction, it would even be "one of the most important measures against misinformation" ever taken by Facebook.

A "vaccine" against "infodemia

With this tool, "Facebook has a vaccine against 'infodemia'," says Fadi Quran, campaign manager at Avaaz. According to American university studies commissioned by the organisation, the mechanism would indeed reduce belief in 'fake news' by between 50% and 61%.

Facebook users will not know exactly what false information they have been exposed to, or when. The interaction must have taken place within the last two weeks. Another drawback is that the alerts only concern "fake news" that Facebook has removed because of health risks. The platform does not say how many messages will be sent in the next few days, but in March alone, "hundreds of thousands of contents" related to Covid-19 were deleted by the social network. The operation could therefore be on a large scale.

For "fake news" whose visibility has been reduced but which have not been deleted, the social network will continue as usual to label them, after verification by its 60 "fact-checkers", including AFP. 40 million Facebook posts were reported in this way in March, according to figures published on Thursday. "In 95% of cases, after seeing these labels, people do not click on the content," Zuckerberg said.

22 days to identify fake news on Facebook

Facebook is not the only platform to try to hunt down the "fake news" that have gone back with the epidemic. YouTube, for example, also displays a banner referring to the WHO site below each video dealing with the coronavirus. Google's platform has removed "thousands of videos" that provided false cures, questioned the very existence of Covid-19 or the usefulness of social distancing...

However, these efforts are still struggling to put an end to false information for good. The task is further complicated by the fact that, because of the confinement, platforms can make less use of their moderators and therefore make more use of detection algorithms that are still imperfect.

Avaaz looked at a sample of 100 "fake news" about coronavirus on Facebook and found that they had been shared 1.7 million times and viewed 117 million times. On average, Facebook would also wait 22 days before "flashing" a fake news item, "considerable delays," according to the organization. Finally, 41% of the "infoxes" analyzed by Facebook partners remained on the platform without any warning.

But for Facebook, the sample chosen by Avaaz is "not representative" and does not reflect the work done. Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, prefers to refer to the 350 million people who clicked on Facebook and Instagram to access official WHO health messages. That is almost as many as the population of the United States.