Social-Media
Facebook is reducing the scope of the contested New York Post article about Joe Biden's son.
Facebook has narrowed the scope of the New York Post article, which makes the contested allegations about Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter, following a study of the evidence. While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want to make it clear that this story is eligible to be actually checked by Facebook's third-party fact-checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its dissemination on our website, tweeted Andy Stone, Facebook Policy Relations Manager.
The Post story, released today, claims to have received emails and video from a laptop that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden. But some journalists doubted the truth of the details that the Post said was given with the assistance of President Donald Trump's counsel Rudy Giuliani and former advisor Steve Bannon. In the meantime, the post has been extensively spread on social media. According to CrowdTangle data, there are over 40,000 Facebook interactions and a much smaller number on Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter.
The story has been aggregated by a variety of other sources, and it is not known whether Facebook will limit the reach of such posts as well.
Facebook works with a number of fact-checking organisations and downgrades information that is partly or entirely inaccurate, applies an alert mark and makes people less likely to see it. (It removes any posts that it finds likely to cause harm, including misleading statements about COVID-19.) But the Post — a big tabloid operated by Rupert Belfast-founded News Corp — has considerably more clout than the stereotypical Facebook "fake news" accounts. Stone's comment indicates that this new action is more provisional and possibly reversible.
Facebook has limited at least one previous post story, an opinion piece that supports the widely unfounded hypothesis that COVID-19 has fled from a Chinese laboratory. According to a follow-up report in the Post, the mark was deleted later. The tale, though, was an opinion piece focused on public knowledge rather than a news scoop. It's more difficult to tell — to verify a claim that is focused on documents supposedly received by a single news outlet — which is clearly not uncommon for an investigation article.
As political journalist Judd Legum points out on Twitter, the Post 's story mostly raises concerns as to whether the emails he shared were framed in an accurate fashion, whether they really originated from a device owned by Hunter Biden, and if they were distributed from a credible source. (Among other questionable practices, Giuliani pushed unsubstantiated allegations about COVID-19, and Bannon was charged with defrauding the supporters of a multi-million dollar crowdfunding campaign.)
Facebook has promised to crack down on content that might cause confusion and disinformation during the 2020 general race, though — and hitting a break on an incendiary article about the son of a presidential contender appears to be part of the initiative.
