Avaaz findings 1
Was misinformation on Facebook worse in 2016 or 2020?
2020
Mark Zuckerberg
10.1 billion
Estimated views of content from top-performing pages that repeatedly shared misinformation (that FB could have stopped people from seeing)
Stop the Steal
Parley
What a post on Parler is called
What has Facebook done for many of its emergency policies it adapted around the 2020 elections?
Rolled them back
“64% of all extremist group joins are due to our
recommendation tools”.
Facebook researchers in 2016
What groups did Facebook allows to target swing state voters with false and misleading ads leading to more than 10 million impressions
SuperPACs
How decrease the number of people who believe misinformation by 50%
Retroactive corrections
Stopthesteal
Most popular hashtag on Parler
Avaaz team found hundreds of pages and groups that were repeatedly sharing disinformation to do these two things
Polarize American society and break down trust in America's democratic institutions
“an abiding sense of loyalty to the fringe online conspiracy movement known as QAnon is emerging as a common thread among scores of the men and women from around the country arrested for their participation in the deadly U.S. Capitol insurrection”.
Court records
Steve Bannon
Has content removed in mid-November 2020 after Avaaz reports he is using inauthentic behavior to amplify the "Stop the Steal" narrative
125 million
realDonaldTrump
Most mentioned user on Twitter
The prediction for violent events such as the Capitol attack if Facebook doesn't change its policies
They will keep happening.
the platform’s efforts “paid off in the 2020 election when you think about what we know today about thedifference between 2016 and 2020.”
Sheryl Sandberg (Chief Operating Officer)
80 percent
How much Avaaz estimates that Facebook could reduce the spread of misinformation by detoxing its algorithms
100 million
Voters who saw voter fraud content on Facebook designed to discredit the election
Who suspended Parler?
Amazon Web Services
What percent of those charged in the Jan. 6 siege were NOT connected to extremist groups
55%
“ President Donald Trump’s campaign is using a snippet of video to show a moment when Joe Biden ostensibly stumbled when asked about court packing ... In reality, the full video shows that Biden gave a lengthy answer, and then Biden’s staff began moving members of the press to attend the next campaign event. ”
Politifact
During the anti-racism protests, what actually surpassed the top US media pages in terms of engagement (reactions, comments, shares)
Top-performing pages that repeatedly shared misinformation
Called Donald Trump and 25 others repeat misinformers "superspreaders" accounting for 28.6 percent of interactions people had overall with such content on Facebook
New York Times
6.19%
Content generated by most active user on Parler (Patriots4US)