Avaaz: Facebook continues to fail at flagging false and misleading posts about US elections

Facebook is still failing to spot and flag false and misleading posts about elections, according to a new report published by Avaaz. The U.S.-based nonprofit analyzed a cross section of election misinformation on Facebook ahead of the pivotal U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia. Avaaz found that 60% of detected false and misleading posts on the platform reached thousands of voters without fact-check labels. The report comes as investigations suggest Facebook is failing to stem the overall spread of misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech on its platform. In January, Seattle University associate professor Caitlin Carlson published results of an experiment in which she and a colleague collected more than 300 posts that appeared to violate Facebook’s hate speech rules. (Only about half the posts were ultimately removed.) Separately, according to the Washington Post and others, allies of U.S. President Donald Trump have received few penalties under Facebook’s rules. Former employees told the publication that Trump-aligned accounts have been protected against strict enforcement because of concerns about the perception of anti-conservative bias. Avaaz documented and analyzed 204 Facebook posts between November 4 and November 23 that promoted 12 different false election-related claims about Georgia and were fact-checked by PolitiFact,  » Read More