Is there evidence that Facebook users in the EU see more misinformation about COVID-19 than users in the US?
The nonprofit Avaaz recently published research arguing Facebook does a much poorer job at labeling misinformation about the coronavirus in Europe than in the U.S. The company’s “‘America First’ approach to fighting misinformation fails to protect European citizens,” the group said.
Its findings were similar to those of a 2020 survey by NewsGuard, a content-rating service, of Facebook misinformation “super-spreaders,” which found Facebook’s enforcement in Europe was “far lower.”
Research last year by Cambridge University researchers on levels of acceptance of misinformation about COVID-19 provides tangential support for these findings. The study found that citizens in Ireland and Spain (as well as Mexico) were more likely to accept the unproved claim that “the coronavirus was engineered in a laboratory in Wuhan” than citizens in the U.K. and the U.S.
