Fb shelved its report on 'most viewed posts' that made it look bad on countering vaccine misinformation

San Francisco: Facebook reportedly shelved a report for the first quarter of 2021 that might have reflected poorly on the social networking giant for its handling of Covid misinformation on its platform.

The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the report, said the most viewed links in the first quarter had headlines that could promote COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, which has become a problem on social media platforms.

One of the captions read, "A 'healthy' doctor dies two weeks after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine; The CDC is investigating the reason." The article was published by The South Florida Sun Sentinel and republished by The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times said.

Facebook executives apparently "debated whether it would cause a public relations problem, according to the internal emails" and ultimately decided not to publish it, the NYT report mentioned on Friday.

"We considered making the report public earlier but since we knew the attention it would garner, exactly as we saw this week, there were fixes to the system we wanted to make," Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement.

However, Facebook released its first report on the most widely viewed content in the last quarter in News Feed, starting with domains, links, Pages and posts in the US, on August 18. Facebook had declared that to paint a complete picture and provide more extensive detail of what people actually see on its platform, it will release 'Widely Viewed Content Reports' on a quarterly basis, starting in the US and eventually including more international data.