Safety and Integrity on our Platforms: Progress in Q2

Combating COVID-19 Misinformation

We’re committed to helping people get authoritative information, including vaccine information. We continue to remove harmful COVID-19 misinformation and prohibit ads that try to exploit the pandemic for financial gain. Since the start of the pandemic through July:

• We removed more than 20 million pieces of content from Facebook and Instagram globally for violating our policies on COVID-19-related misinformation and harm.
• We have removed over 3,000 accounts, pages, and groups across our entire platform for repeatedly violating our rules against spreading COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation.
• We displayed warnings on more than 190 million pieces of content on Facebook based on COVID-19-related debunking articles written by our fact checking partners.

To learn more about how we’re supporting COVID-19 relief efforts and keeping people informed, visit our COVID-19 action page.

Widely Viewed Content Report

Today we’re releasing the first of a series of reports that will give an overview of the most widely viewed content in News Feed, starting with domains, links, Pages and posts in the US. The Widely Viewed Content Report will be updated quarterly in the Transparency Center and will be released in conjunction with each quarterly Community Standards Enforcement Report.

Our inaugural report contains some noteworthy takeaways. For example:

• The content that’s seen by the most people isn’t necessarily the content that also gets the most engagement. Read more about how engagement — the likes, shares, and comments a Page or post generates — doesn’t equate to its reach, the number of people who actually see it.
• The majority (57%) of posts that people see is from their family and friends, in line with changes we made in the past so that content from friends and family makes up a larger portion of News Feed.
• This report sheds light on the kinds of posts and Pages that are actually the most widely viewed — with many of the most-viewed Pages focused on sharing content about pets, cooking, family and relatable viral content.

It’s important to note that there is so much content on Facebook that even the most-viewed content is still a small portion of what people see. Given the customized nature of News Feed, most of what people see on Facebook is uniquely personalized to them. To paint a complete picture and provide more extensive detail of what people actually see on Facebook, we’ll release Widely Viewed Content Reports on a quarterly basis, starting in the US and eventually including more international data.

Progress on Hate Speech

Prevalence of hate speech on Facebook continued to decrease for the third quarter in a row. In Q2, it was 0.05%, or 5 views per 10,000 views, down from 0.05-0.06%, or 5 to 6 views per 10,000 views in Q1.