More Facebook problems? Controversy over the August report

According to the platform, there was a “technical error”.

In August this year, Facebook published a report of the most watched content on the platform in the last quarter in the United States. There would be nothing extraordinary about it if not for the fact that the company had prepared such a report much earlier. However, it was not made available due to the results unattractive for Facebook’s image – out of the 20 most popular posts, only 4 were original content, most of them were ordinary copies from other social media or images circulating on the web for some time.

Over the past few years, Facebook has allegedly been giving scientists access to all of its data to track the spread of disinformation on the platform. As it turned out, the specialists examining the new report realized that the company also gave them incomplete and incorrect data this time. University of Urbino professor Fabio Giglietto compared the data given to the researchers with a report that Facebook had published publicly and found that they did not agree with each other.

Facebook spokesman Mavis Jones dubbed the inaccuracies a “technical error” and assured that the company was working on a quick and efficient solution to the problem, but that it could take weeks due to the enormous amount of data to be processed. He also adds that only the data for US users was inaccurate, and that for non-US users was already correct.

Facebook is criticized, among other things, for its poor contribution to the fight against fake news

Many people believe that the platform carries out extensive censorship, and such actions reinforce this belief. Additionally, in August, Facebook disabled accounts related to the NYU Ad Observatory project, which investigated how social networking sites – including Facebook – used data to position political ads.

Due to such events, disinformation specialists have significantly hindered their activities. So the question is how to fight disinformation when researchers can’t even get accurate data?