Last Wednesday, Facebook released a report that reveals the type of content most viewed by people in the US last quarter. This is the first time that the company has come up with such a report. According to The New York Times, Facebook worked out a similar kind of report for the first quarter of 2021 but in the end, opted not to share it publicly.
The New York Times obtained a copy of the report and reported that the most-viewed link in the first quarter had a headline that could promote COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy this is why Facebook didn’t share the data in the first quarter.
The critical headline was “A ‘healthy’ doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID-19 vaccine; CDC is investigating why.” It was published by The South Florida Sun Sentinel and republished by The Chicago Tribune.
Facebook executives like Alex Schultz who is Facebook’s CMO and VP of analytics “debated whether it would cause a public relations problem”. Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement “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,”
