During a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company puts Covid-19 misinformation in two categories: One for removing content that might lead to physical harm, and another for more general misinformation based on fact checking by third parties.
Anyone who studies misinformation or other types of malicious or sensitive content knows it can be tricky for even experts to control with or without technology. Francesco Marconi, the founder of AppliedXL—a Newlab company based in Brooklyn that creates AI tools for the media and information industries—said even sophisticated machine-learning models can miss misinformation and hate speech because they still require humans to label articles, words and expressions that are perceived as harmful.
Demand for blocklisting ads next to Covid-19 has slowed in the past few weeks. The ad measurement platform Integral Ad Science has seen an 80% decrease in U.S. demand between mid-March and the first week of May and a 77% decrease in the U.K. “I think there’s a point where if the engagement tools aren’t to foster discourse, there are going to be problems in society long-term,” he said.
The race to navigate how to advertise and monetize around Covid-19 content has led many publishers to roll out innovative new tools faster than usual. And while marketers were wary to appear next to coronavirus articles or other information before, agencies say the brands they work with are now buying more ads on news websites than a few months ago—and perhaps even more than even before the crisis.
Montgomery’s not the only optimist when it comes to how tech advancements might help monetize journalism. Ellie Bamford, vice president and head of media for R/GA, said her clients were eager to pull away from Covid-19 content as quickly as possible back in March. However, it became a problem in terms of the sheer volume of content about the crisis and now they’re learning to adapt.
realDonaldTrump
Why does Facebook get to decide what’s considered misinformation? 🤔
fb or twitter shouldn’t continue moderating anything unless they’re interested in being the digital version of privately owned newspaper. sick.
Facebook is just choosing who to suppress. What makes them the determiner of the truth.We need lots of different viewpoints about the virus. It will take a long time to know what is real.