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Auckland, April 16, 2021
Facebook launched on Thursday, April 15, 2021, a public education campaign to help people in Fiji learn how to identify and combat health misinformation.
Three key factors
The campaign, which will run for five weeks in Fiji includes graphics and videos that will run in English, Fijian Hindi and Fijian iTaukei, and aims to support local users with three key behaviours: (1) Awareness: Be informed that misinformation exists (2) Investigation: Find out more to confirm if the information is indeed false (3) Action: Visit the local health authority to get accurate information
Facebook’s Director of Public Policy for Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Islands Mia Garlick said that the company is committed to connect people to reliable information and give them the tools to make informed decisions about the information they see on Facebook.
“For this campaign, we are focusing our efforts further to target Covid-19 and Vaccine-related misinformation, ensuring that Fijians are able to scrutinise what they are seeing against official public health resources,” she said.
Ms Garlick said that Facebook will continue to work with health experts including the World Health Organisation and local partners.
“We want to make sure that we have the right policies in place to reduce the spread of harmful Covid-19 misinformation on our platform. Throughout the pandemic, Facebook has worked closely with the World Health Organisation to direct people to authoritative Covid-19 information, and to do more to identify and take action to remove incorrect claims about the virus,” she said.
Misinformation Campaign
The public education campaign on misinformation will commence for 5 weeks from today (15 April). To learn more about the campaign, visit
www.fightcovidmisinfo.com
www.fightcovidmisinfo.com/fijian-hindi
www.fightcovidmisinfo.com/fijian-itaukei
Globally, Facebook has connected over two billion people to resources from health authorities through the Covid-19 Information Centre and removed more than 12 million pieces of harmful misinformation about Covid-19 and approved vaccines from its platforms.
Facebook has also put warning labels over 167 million posts marked as false by third party fact checkers. When people see warning labels, about 95% of the time they do not go on to view the original content.
Facebook’s Covid-19 Information Centre is available in Fiji.
Facebook partners with 80 fact-checking partners around the world to reduce the distribution of other spammy, sensational content like clickbait and engagement bait– which can coincide with misinformation.
In the Oceanic region, including Fiji, Facebook partners with Australian Associated Press (AAP) and Agence France-Presse (AFP). When they fact-check something as false, Facebook dramatically reduces its distribution.
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