Facebook Takes Action to Remove ‘Disinformation Dozen’

Yesterday Facebook announced that it had taken action against the ‘disinformation dozen’. This announcement comes one month after the White House singled out twelve people and argued that they were responsible for 65% of misinformation regarding the Coronavirus. Vice President of Content Policy at Facebook, Monica Bickert said that the social media company had “imposed penalties on nearly two dozen additional pages, groups or accounts linked to these 12 people” and “applied penalties to some of their website domains.”

The ‘disinformation dozen’ was initially identified in March by the center for countering digital hate which called on Facebook to shut down pages operated by those people. The White House latched on the report and called out Facebook last month for allowing the people identified in the report to remain on the platform. At that time Facebook said it had taken some action against the pages.