Facebook announced on Thursday that they will begin alerting users who have interacted with “misinformation” about the coronavirus and refer them to information from the World Health Organization.
Ironically, the World Health Organization has peddled quite a lot of misinformation themselves.
Facebook will be deleting posts that deviate from information provided by the World Health Organization.
“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,” Facebook’s vice president of integrity, Guy Rosen, wrote in a blog post.
The WHO has previously advised against travel restrictions on China and claimed that the virus does not spread person to person, based on shoddy information from the Chinese Communist Party.
The messages will go out to users “in the coming weeks.” The Hill reports that Facebook is also adding a new section to its coronavirus information center dedicated to vetted articles that focus on debunking misinformation.
During the month of March, the platform says that they added warning labels to approximately 40 million posts about the coronavirus, based on roughly 4,000 articles reviewed by their team of fact checkers.
“When posts including those labels appeared on the news feed, users did not go on to view the original content in 95 percent of cases,” the Hill report continues.
