Facebook is having a tougher time managing vaccine misinformation than it is letting on, leaks suggest

In public, Facebook has touted the resources it has dedicated to tackling Covid-19 and vaccine misinformation, even scolding US President Joe Biden for his harsh criticism of the company's handling of the issue. In doing so, it claimed that "more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the internet."

But internal Facebook (FB) documents suggest a disconnect between what the company has said publicly about its overall response to Covid-19 misinformation and some of its employees' findings concerning the issue.

"We have no idea about the scale of the [Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy] problem when it comes to comments," an internal research report posted to Facebook's internal site in February 2021, a year into the pandemic, noted. "Our internal systems are not yet identifying, demoting and/or removing anti-vaccine comments often enough," the report pointed out.