The surgeon general wants Facebook to do more to stop Covid-19 lies
United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy says that misinformation — much of it on tech platforms — is a public health threat that has cost people’s lives and prolonged the Covid pandemic.
As Murthy said in a Thursday press conference, health advisories are usually about things people physically consume: food, drinks, cigarettes. But the first advisory of his tenure in the Biden administration (he was also the surgeon general under President Obama) is about what we consume with our eyes and ears: misinformation.
The advisory comes with a set of guidelines on how to “build a healthy information environment,” with recommendations for everyone from social media users up to the platforms themselves (also: health workers, researchers, and the media). Murthy also went on some of those very platforms to spread the message, including Twitter and Facebook.
“Today, we live in a world where misinformation poses an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health,” Murthy said in a press conference, adding that “modern technology companies” have allowed misinformation and disinformation to spread across their platforms “with little accountability.”
The advisory isn’t a set of orders that must be followed by these companies, but the increased scrutiny and attention does put pressure on them to more aggressively combat the falsehoods spreading on their platforms.
This health advisory comes as Covid vaccination rates in the United States are dropping, while cases are picking back up, and the fast-spreading delta variant takes hold. The vast majority of Covid-related hospitalizations and deaths have been for people who aren’t vaccinated, despite the widespread availability of vaccines in the US. And with some people choosing not to get vaccinated because they believe misinformation about the vaccines, the Biden administration has reportedly decided it’s time to fight back.
Coronavirus misinformation isn’t just contained to social media. But social media gives it a stage and reach that offline platforms don’t have, and this has been a concern for years. Mis- or disinformation has potentially influenced the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, increased political polarization, contributed to the rise of the QAnon conspiracy theory, played a role in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and, now, helped to prolong the pandemic.
As researcher Carl T. Bergstrom, co-author of “Stewardship of global collective behavior,” a paper that calls for more research into social media’s impact on society, told Recode’s Shirin Ghaffary, “social media in particular — as well as a broader range of internet technologies, including algorithmically driven search and click-based advertising — have changed the way that people get information and form opinions about the world. And they seem to have done so in a manner that makes people particularly vulnerable to the spread of misinformation and disinformation.”
For their part, social media platforms have made attempts to stop the spread of false information, including removing posts and videos and banning accounts that spread it, as well as appending fact-checks or links to trusted information on posts and videos that might be misleading. As it became more likely that there would soon be a Covid vaccine at the end of 2020, various platforms were proactive in preparing for the vaccine misinformation that would (and did) inevitably follow. This came after years of these companies doing very little to stop the spread of misinformation about other vaccines, and despite many warnings from experts about the potential harm to public health done by hosting anti-vaccine content and communities.
“We agree with the Surgeon General – tackling health misinformation takes a whole-of-society approach,” a Twitter spokesperson told Recode in a statement. “We’ll continue to take enforcement action on content that violates our COVID-19 misleading information policy and improve and expand our efforts to elevate credible, reliable health information — now, amid the COVID-19 pandemic — and as we collectively navigate the public health challenges to come.”
YouTube spokesperson Elena Hernandez told Recode that the platform “removes content in accordance with our COVID-19 misinformation policies, which we keep current based on guidance from local health authorities. We also demote borderline videos and prominently surface authoritative content for COVID-19-related search results, recommendations, and context panels.”
But many believe their efforts are too little, too late, and still don’t go far enough — including, it seems, the surgeon general.
“We expect more from our technology companies,” Murthy said.
Let’s see if we get it — and if, at this point, it will help.
Every week over 1 billion people connect with businesses on our messaging apps. Many of these conversations are made possible by the thousands of developers who build innovative and engaging experiences on Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Since opening access to our Llama family of large language models, we’ve seen lots of momentum and innovation with more than 30 million downloads to date. As our messaging services continue to evolve, we believe the technology from Llama and other generative AI models have the potential to enhance business messaging through more natural, conversational experiences.
At Connect Meta announced that developers will be able to build third-party AIs – a term we use to refer to our generative AI-powered assistants – for our messaging services.
We’re making it easy for any developer to get started, so we’re simplifying the developer onboarding process and providing access to APIs for AIs that make it possible to build new conversational experiences within our messaging apps.
All developers will be able to access the new onboarding experience and features on Messenger in the coming weeks. For WhatsApp, we’ll be opening a Beta program in November – if you’re interested in participating please sign up to the waitlist here to learn more.
We’ll keep everyone updated as we make these tools available to more developers later this year. We look forward to your feedback and seeing what you create.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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
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