Facebook will begin showing notifications to users who have interacted with posts that contain “harmful” coronavirus misinformation, the company announced on Thursday, in an aggressive new move to address the spread of false information about Covid-19.The group wants Facebook’s notifications to be more explicit about the misinformation that the user was exposed to, and it wants the notification shown to any user who saw the misinformation in their news feed, regardless of whether they interacted with the post.“We think that correcting the record retroactively … will make people more resilient to misinformation in the future, and it will disincentivize malicious users,” said Quran. Claire Wardle, the US director of First Draft News, said that she generally shared Facebook’s concern that repeating the misinformation in a notification could have a negative effect. Wardle usually advises debunkers of misinformation to “lead with the fact”, but she noted that such a rule is difficult to follow in relation to the pandemic, where scientific understanding of the virus is continuously evolving.
Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/16/coronavirus-facebook-misinformation-warning
