84% of medical misinformation on Facebook is never tagged with a warning, and is viewed billions...

[Nevilledog]

84% of medical misinformation on Facebook is never tagged with a warning, and is viewed billions of times, report says

https://www.yahoo.com/news/84-medical-misinformation-facebook-never-132115568.html

A large majority of Facebook posts containing medical misinformation — 84% — were left online with no labels or warnings, according to a report by the group Avaaz.

It said that its survey of bogus medical claims and advice on the platform found that only 16% of posts were given a label highlighting their contents as untrue, unproven, or harmful. The other 84% were not.

The report by Avaaz, a US non-profit, looked at 174 pieces of content that were fact-checked by a credible third party and found to contain health misinformation.

Avaaz found that many posts, some of which reached millions of people, managed to avoid being labelled by Facebook by reposting content from other pages or translating it into other languages.

*snip*

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. It's only medical misinformation.

I have noticed that an astonishingly large number of people simply repeat something they see on FB without ever thinking to double check to see if it's true. It happens constantly and makes me a bit crazy.