After heavy criticism, Facebook released the Q1 2021 transparency report regarding the most-viewed content on its platform.

This was previously shelved and now popped up with a fair reason shared by the companyโ€™s policy manager. Facebook had also shared its Q2 2021 transparency report last week.

Most-Viewed Content on Facebook

Facebook decided to release a quarterly transparency report revealing the most-viewed content and other similar information in the period for unknown reasons.

This could be because a tech columnist of The New York Times โ€“ Kevin Roose โ€“ was curating and sharing the daily lists of the top-performing US Facebook pages from a Facebook-owned content analytics platform called CrowdTangle.

Reason apart, the company held the transparency report of this yearโ€™s Q1 and released it now after being demanded. This was shared by Facebookโ€™s policy communications manager Andy Stone on Saturday, along with an explanation for the delay;

โ€œNews outlets wrote about the south Florida doctor that died. When the coroner released a cause of death, the Chicago Tribune appended an update to its original story; NYTimes did not. Would it have been right to remove the Times story because it was COVID misinfo?โ€ he tweeted.

โ€œOf course not. No one is actually suggesting this, and neither am I. But it does illustrate just how difficult it is to define misinformation.โ€ He further explained the reason for holding the report is because โ€œthere were key fixes to the system we wanted to make.โ€

While he didnโ€™t detail those fixes, he shared a link to the transparency report of Q1 2021. When checked, the most-viewed content in this period is about the death of a Florida doctor, whose reason for death was suggested to be the COVID-19 vaccine.

And in the Q2 report released last week, the most-viewed content was a puzzle asking people to pick the first three words they see.

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