Gizmodo – Here’s How Meta Became the Internet’s Biggest Hub of Covid-19 Misinformation: “…From the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, Facebook understood the outsized role its platform would plays in shaping public opinion about the virus and the safeguards that governments would inevitably institute in hopes of containing it. Ten months before the first reported U.S. infection, Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, had laid out in a company blog a plan for “Combatting Vaccine Misinformation.” And while the title alludes to efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation — namely, by curtailing its distribution in the News Feed — what the blog really reveals is that, at some point, Facebook made a conscious decision to continue hosting vaccine misinformation rather than aggressively purge it. It was a missed opportunity, given that, at the time, the groups and pages promoting “anti-vaxxer” sentiment were relatively few in number. Very soon, that would all change. In our latest drop of the Facebook Papers, Gizmodo is publishing 18 documents that shed light on the internal discussions within Facebook on covid-19. The papers, only a handful of which have ever been shown to the public, include a number of candid conversations among mid- and high-level employees; researchers, managers, and engineers with appreciably different views on the company’s moral obligations. Facebook declined to comment…”