According to a study published on Friday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Facebook did not mark eighty percent of articles on its platform that promote the conspiracy theory, which is spreading rapidly, that the United States is funding biological weapons in Ukraine.
This was reported by The Guardian.
A nonprofit research group on disinformation examined a sample of posts from 24 February to 14 March that contained external articles containing baseless claims about biological weapons. It was found that in eighty percent of cases, Facebook did not mark messages as "missing context", containing "partially false information", or "false information".
"If our researchers can find false information about Ukraine that is openly disseminated on its platform, Meta can do the same," said CCDH Executive Director Imran Ahmed. "But we've found that in the vast majority of cases, conspiracy theories are given freedom to spread."
CCDH researchers used NewsWhip's social analytics tool to find more than 120 articles from outside sites that contained false or misleading allegations about biological weapons laboratories or false statements made by US officials, and found that articles in the sample received more than 150,000 likes, comments, comments, and Facebook shares.
CCDH called on Meta to use its "false information" and "partially false information" labels more carefully and to expand the use of the existing "missing context" label.
"Russia's propaganda campaigns have benefited for years from the fact that Meta has turned a blind eye to disinformation," Ahmed said. "The goal is bad at curbing serious disinformation narratives in favor of the Putin regime."
Russia systematically spreads misinformation about the existence in Ukraine of laboratories financed by the USA which make biological weapons. In particular, the Russian Ministry of Defense claims to have received data on a US project in Ukrainian laboratories to study the spread of dangerous infections by migratory birds.
Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov even said such weapons were "ethnically oriented."