Facebook removes posts as misinformation spreads

SAN FRANCISCO • Facebook said it would take down misinformation about China's fast-spreading coronavirus, in a rare departure from its usual approach to dubious health content that is presenting a fresh challenge for social media companies.

The outbreak has stoked a wave of anti-China sentiment around the globe. Hoaxes have spread widely online, promoted by conspiracy theorists and exacerbated by a dearth of information from the cordoned-off zone around China's central city of Wuhan, where the outbreak began.

Facebook said in a blog post that it would remove content about the virus "with false claims or conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organisations and local health authorities", saying such content would violate its ban on misinformation leading to "physical harm".

The move is unusually aggressive for the world's biggest social network, which generally limits the distribution of content containing health misinformation to its 2.9 billion monthly users through restrictions on search results and advertising, but allows the original posts to stay up.

It also puts it at odds with other major social networks based in the United States.

Alphabet's YouTube, which has two billion monthly users, and Twitter and Reddit, which have hundreds of millions of users, confirmed they do not consider inaccurate information about health to be a violation of their policies.

Those companies, like Facebook in other cases, rely on techniques such as elevating medical information from authoritative public health sources and warning users about content that has been debunked.

TikTok - owned by China's ByteDance - and Pinterest do ban health misinformation, and are actively removing false coronavirus content, they told Reuters.

A spokesman for Tencent Holdings' Chinese messaging app WeChat, which has 1.15 billion monthly users, told Reuters the company was removing posts containing coronavirus-related misinformation.

REUTERS