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Conspiracy theorist tactics show it’s too easy to get around Facebook’s content policies
By Amelia Johns, University of Technology Sydney, Emily Booth, University of Technology Sydney, Francesco Bailo, University of Sydney, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu, University of Technology Sydney
During the COVID pandemic, social media platforms were swarmed by far-right and anti-vaccination communities that spread dangerous conspiracy theories.
These included the false claims that vaccines are a form of population control, and that the virus was a “deep state” plot. Governments and the World Health Organization redirected precious resources from vaccination campaigns to debunk these falsehoods.
As the tide of misinformation grew, platforms were accused of not doing enough to stop the spread. To address these concerns, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, made several policy announcements in 2020–21. However, it hesitated to remove “borderline” content, or content that didn’t cause direct physical harm, save for one policy change in February 2021 that expanded the content removal lists.
To stem the tide, Meta continued to rely more heavily on algorithmic moderation techniques to reduce the visibility of misinformation in users’ feeds, search and recommendations – known as shadowbanning. They also used fact-checkers to label misinformation.
While shadowbanning is widely seen as a concerningly opaque technique, our new research, published in the journal Media International Australia, instead asks: was it effective?
What did we investigate?
We used two measures to answer this question. First, after identifying 18 Australian far-right and anti-vaccination accounts that consistently shared misinformation between January 2019 and July 2021, we analysed the performance of these accounts using key metrics.
Second, we mapped this performance against five content moderation policy announcements for Meta’s flagship platform, Facebook.
The findings revealed two divergent trends. After March 2020 the overall performance of the accounts – that is, their median performance – suffered a decline. And yet their mean performance shows increasing levels after October 2020.
This is because, while the majority of the monitored accounts underperformed, a few accounts overperformed instead, and strongly so. In fact, they continued to overperform and attract new followers even after the alleged policy change in February 2021.
Read Full Story https://theconversation.com/conspiracy-theorist-tactics-show-its-too-easy-to-get-around-facebooks-content-policies-226118