Facebook Has Removed 18 Million Posts on COVID-19 Misinformation: Zuckerberg

US President Joe Biden had said last month that social media platforms like Facebook are "killing people".

Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

(Photo: iStock/File Image)

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the social media giant has removed 18 million posts containing misinformation about COVID-19 from its platform.

"If we see harmful misinformation on the platform, then we take it down. It's against our policy," Zuckerberg said in an interview to CBS News on Thursday, 19 June.

When asked if that figure only refers to the number of posts they have taken down, not how many people saw or shared the misinformation, Zuckerberg replied, "The number that I have off the top of my head that I can share is the number of pieces of misinformation that we've taken action against."

They Are Killing People: Biden

It must be noted that the United States President Joe Biden had called out Facebook for not doing enough to stop the spread of misinformation around the COVID-19 vaccine on its platform.

"The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and they're killing people," Biden had said when asked what his message was to platforms like Facebook.

He later balanced out his statement clarifying that he was referring to a recent report of 12 people spreading "outrageous misinformation" on the platform.

"Facebook isn't killing people, these 12 people are out there giving misinformation," the US president had said.

"Anyone listening to it is getting hurt by it. It's killing people. My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally, that somehow I'm saying "Facebook is killing people", that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine," Biden added, as quoted by BBC.

The White House had flagged in July that 12 people were responsible for almost 65 percent of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms and that Facebook, which also owns WhatsApp and Instagram, was not doing enough to stop the spread of COVID-19 misinformation.