Facebook letting fake news spreaders profit, investigators claim
Facebook is allowing users to profit from the spread of potentially dangerous false theories and misinformation about the pandemic and vaccines, including deploying money-raising tools on pages with content flagged up by the social media giant’s own factcheckers.
An investigation has found 430 pages – followed by 45 million people – using Facebook’s tools, including virtual “shops” and fan subscriptions, while spreading false information about Covid-19 or vaccinations.
The findings come despite a promise the platform made last year that no user or company should directly profit from false information about immunisation against Covid-19.
Facebook generally does not share this income, but it does occasionally take a cut, and benefits financially from users engaging with content and staying on its services, exposing them to more ads.
The research, by the London-headquartered Bureau of Investigative Journalism, is likely to have uncovered only a tiny snapshot of the vast amount of monetised misinformation on Facebook related to the pandemic and vaccines.
A Facebook spokesman said the company was investigating the examples brought to its attention, and had “removed a small number of the pages shared with us for violating our policies”.
However, many of the posts identified as misinformation do not violate Facebook rules, the spokesman added, without providing any details.
“Our initial investigation shows a large number of the pages flagged had zero violations against our harmful misinformation policies, and we’d dispute the overall accuracy of the data being provided,” he said.
The pages identified included sites for comedians and religious leaders, social media personalities and traditional media reporters.
There are a large number of alternative health sites, focused on a range of subjects from nutrition to yoga and wellness. Only a minority are clearly focused on the pandemic, or anti-vaccine sentiment. The others are sharing content to broader audiences.
Seven languages are represented – including German, Hebrew, Polish and Spanish – reaching readers around the world.
More than 260 of the pages the bureau identified have posted misinformation about vaccines. The remainder include false information on the pandemic, on vaccines more broadly, or a combination of the two. More than 20 pages identified have gained Facebook’s blue tick signalling authenticity.
For Facebook, offering ways to make money is probably a route to encouraging people to use its platform rather than its competitors’, according to Dr Claire Wardle, executive director of First Draft, a US-based non-profit organisation fighting online misinformation, which contributed to the bureau’s research.
However, Facebook can also profit from the popularity of brands and individuals who spread misinformation. It takes a cut of 5% to 30% on its Stars currency, used by fans to tip creators who stream live video.
Facebook also briefly took up to 30% of fees paid by new supporters from January last year, but reversed this in August.
The bureau found two pages using Stars: An0maly and Sid Roth’s It’s Supernatural, a religious site which has blamed the pandemic on abortion and has featured guests describing a dream in which God showed them the virus being created in a Chinese lab. Between them, the pages have reached more than 2.6 million people.
The site run by An0maly, real name AJ Feleski, who describes himself as a “news analyst & hip-hop artist”, is one of the most influential pages sharing misinformation to be identified by the investigation, with more than 1.5 million followers.
A video from last March, in which he questions if the pandemic is “bio-terrorism”, is one of at least three posts on the page that Facebook’s factcheckers have flagged for containing false or partly false information.
Yet even on Saturday a strap appears under the videos inviting viewers to pay to “Become a supporter” and “Support An0maly and enjoy special benefits”.
Facebook’s policies for creators using monetisation tools include rules against misinformation, especially medical misinformation.
In November, Facebook, along with Google and Twitter, agreed a joint statement with the UK government committing to “the principle that no user or company should directly profit from Covid-19 vaccine mis/disinformation. This removes an incentive for this type of content to be promoted, produced and be circulated.”
The bureau’s findings suggest Facebook has breached this agreement, as well as failed to enforce its own policies.
A Facebook spokesman said: “Pages which repeatedly violate our community standards – including those which spread misinformation about Covid-19 and vaccines – are prohibited from monetising on our platform.
“We take aggressive steps to remove Covid misinformation that leads to imminent physical harm, including false information about approved vaccines.”
The company removed 12 million pieces of Covid misinformation between March and October, and placed factcheck warning labels on 167 million other pieces of content, he added.
Organisations including the UN, the World Health Organization and Unesco said in September that online misinformation “continues to undermine the global response and jeopardises measures to control the pandemic”.
Some of the pages identified in the investigation also directed their followers to more extreme content that has been largely scrubbed from social media.
Veganize, a Portuguese-language page based in Brazil with 129,000 followers, offers paid supporter subscriptions.
A “pinned post”, which is fixed at the top of the page even as new content is added, carries a link to a collection of files hosted on Google including “Plandemic”, a pair of conspiracy-laden, thoroughly discredited videos that briefly went viral last summer before social networks made strenuous efforts to remove them.
Groups spreading information flagged by factcheckers as false have also used Facebook to fundraise. The Informed Consent Action Network (Ican), a US non-profit, is one of the most well-funded organisations in the US opposing vaccinations.
Facebook and YouTube removed pages for Highwire, an online show run by Ican founder Del Bigtree that made claims repeatedly rated as false by factcheckers, for which Ican says it is suing the tech companies.
Yet despite removing the Highwire page, Facebook still allows Ican to solicit donations from its more than 44,000 followers on a page that has had at least two posts flagged by factcheckers. According to its page, Ican has raised almost £24,000 since February 2020.
Facebook must approve organisations signing up to raise funds and vaccine misinformation is explicitly cited as a reason that fundraising may be removed from an organisation.
Wardle, from First Draft, believes the money-making systems Facebook offers could encourage people to spread misinformation.
“It is human nature. We know one of the motivations is financial,” she said.
“They have started to believe these things, but when you are in that circle, you also realise there is a way to make money, then you realise that the more you get hits the more money you are making. It’s more than the dopamine hit – it’s dopamine plus dollars.”
Today, we are releasing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0. As part of this release, we are highlighting changes below that we believe are relevant to parts of our developer community. These changes include announcements, product updates, and notifications on deprecations that we believe are relevant to your application(s)’ integration with our platform.
For a complete list of all changes and their details, please visit our changelog.
General Updates
Consolidation of Audience Location Status Options for Location Targeting
As previously announced in May 2023, we have consolidated Audience Location Status to our current default option of “People living in or recently in this location” when choosing the type of audience to reach within their Location Targeting selections. This update reflects a consolidation of other previously available options and removal of our “People traveling in this location” option.
We are making this change as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver more value to businesses, simplify our ads system, and streamline our targeting options in order to increase performance efficiency and remove options that have low usage.
This update will apply to new or duplicated campaigns. Existing campaigns created prior to launch will not be entered in this new experience unless they are in draft mode or duplicated.
Add “add_security_recommendation” and “code_expiration_minutes” to WA Message Templates API
Earlier this year, we released WhatsApp’s authentication solution which enabled creating and sending authentication templates with native buttons and preset authentication messages. With the release of Graph API v18, we’re making improvements to the retrieval of authentication templates, making the end-to-end authentication template process easier for BSPs and businesses.
With Graph API v18, BSPs and businesses can have better visibility into preset authentication message template content after creation. Specifically, payloads will return preset content configuration options, in addition to the text used by WhatsApp. This improvement can enable BSPs and businesses to build “edit” UIs for authentication templates that can be constructed on top of the API.
Note that errors may occur when upgrading to Graph API v18 if BSPs or businesses are taking the entire response from the GET request and providing it back to the POST request to update templates. To resolve, the body/header/footer text fields should be dropped before passing back into the API.
Re-launching dev docs and changelogs for creating Call Ads
- Facebook Reels Placement for Call Ads
Meta is releasing the ability to deliver Call Ads through the Facebook Reels platform. Call ads allow users to call businesses in the moment of consideration when they view an ad, and help businesses drive more complex discussions with interested users. This is an opportunity for businesses to advertise with call ads based on peoples’ real-time behavior on Facebook. Under the Ad set Level within Ads Manager, businesses can choose to add “Facebook Reels” Under the Placements section. - Re-Launching Call Ads via API
On September 12, 2023, we’re providing updated guidance on how to create Call Ads via the API. We are introducing documentation solely for Call Ads, so that 3P developers can more easily create Call Ads’ campaigns and know how to view insights about their ongoing call ad campaigns, including call-related metrics. In the future, we also plan to support Call Add-ons via our API platform. Developers should have access to the general permissions necessary to create general ads in order to create Call Ads via the API platform.Please refer to developer documentation for additional information.
Deprecations & Breaking Changes
Graph API changes for user granular permission feature
We are updating two graph API endpoints for WhatsAppBusinessAccount. These endpoints are as follows:
- Retrieve message templates associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
- Retrieve phone numbers associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
With v18, we are rolling out a new feature “user granular permission”. All existing users who are already added to WhatsAppBusinessAccount will be backfilled and will continue to have access (no impact).
The admin has the flexibility to change these permissions. If the admin changes the permission and removes access to view message templates or phone numbers for one of their users, that specific user will start getting an error message saying you do not have permission to view message templates or phone numbers on all versions v18 and older.
Deprecate legacy metrics naming for IG Media and User Insights
Starting on September 12, Instagram will remove duplicative and legacy, insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API in order to share a single source of metrics to our developers.
This new upgrade reduces any confusion as well as increases the reliability and quality of our reporting.
After 90 days of this launch (i.e. December 11, 2023), we will remove all these duplicative and legacy insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API on all versions in order to be more consistent with the Instagram app.
We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received from our developer community, and look forward to continuing to work together.
Please review the media insights and user insights developer documentation to learn more.
Deprecate all Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 endpoints
Facebook Wi-Fi was designed to improve the experience of connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots at businesses. It allowed a merchant’s customers to get free Wi-Fi simply by checking in on Facebook. It also allowed merchants to control who could use their Wi-Fi and for how long, and integrated with ads to enable targeting to customers who had used the merchant’s Wi-Fi. This product was deprecated on June 12, 2023. As the partner notice period has ended, all endpoints used by Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 have been deprecated and removed.
API Version Deprecations:
As part of Facebook’s versioning schedule for Graph API and Marketing API, please note the upcoming deprecations:
Graph API
- September 14, 2023: Graph API v11.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 8, 2024: Graph API v12.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- May 28, 2024: Graph API v13.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
Marketing API
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v14.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v15.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 06, 2024: Marketing API v16.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
To avoid disruption to your business, we recommend migrating all calls to the latest API version that launched today.
Facebook Platform SDK
As part of our 2-year deprecation schedule for Platform SDKs, please note the upcoming deprecations and sunsets:
- October 2023: Facebook Platform SDK v11.0 or below will be sunset
- February 2024: Facebook Platform SDK v12.0 or below will be sunset
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Before today (August 28, 2023), advertisers could not promote images and/or videos used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API. This process created unwanted friction for our partners and their customers.
After consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and/or video media used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API as of August 28, 2023.
We appreciate all the feedback received from our developer community, and hope to continue improving your experience.
Please review the developer documentation to learn more.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Launching second release of Facebook Reels API: An enterprise solution for desktop and web publishers
We’re excited to announce that the second release of FB Reels API is now publicly available for third-party developers. FB Reels API enables users of third-party platforms to share Reels directly to public Facebook Pages and the New Pages Experience.
FB Reels API has grown significantly since the first release in September 2022. The new version of the APIs now support custom thumbnails, automatic music tagging, tagging collaborators, longer format of reels and better error handling.
FB Reels API will also support scheduling and draft capability to allow creators to take advantage of tools provided either by Meta or by our partners. Based on the feedback we received from our partners, we’ll now provide additional audio insights via the Audio Recommendations API and reels performance metrics via the Insights API.
Our goal in the next couple of releases is to continue to make it easier for creators to develop quality content by adding features like early copyright detection and A/B testing. We’re also excited to start working on enhanced creation features like Video clipping- so stay tuned to hear more about those features in the future.
Call-to-Action
If you are a developer interested in integrating with the Facebook Reels API, please refer to the Developer Documents for more info.
Not sure if this product is for you? Check out our entire suite of sharing offerings.
Tune in to Product @scale event to learn more about FB Video APIs and hear from some of our customers.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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