PUBLIC RELATIONS 101

Facebook Nixed Unflattering Report on Viral Posts: NYT

The most-viewed link on Facebook during the first three months of 2021 led to an article about a Florida doctor who died after receiving a coronavirus vaccine.

Facebook released a report this week detailing the content on its eponymous social network that had garnered the most views, and the dossier showed that family-friendly posts like recipes and animal videos dominated. The company had produced a similar report earlier this year, however, that showed the darker side of Facebook, The New York Times reports: the most-viewed link during the first three months of 2021 led to an article from The South Florida Sun Sentinel about a Florida doctor died after he received a coronavirus vaccine. Facebook executives thought the report would cause a public relations problem, so they decided to shelve it. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that the earlier report was nixed: “We considered making the report public earlier, but since we knew the attention it would garner, exactly as we saw this week, there were fixes to the system we wanted to make.”