Facebook shelved a transparency report on its most-viewed posts after it revealed an anti-vax article was one of its most popular links.

The first-quarter report showed that the company’s most-viewed article between January and March this year was a news story claiming that the death of a Florida doctor was linked to having taken the Covid-19 vaccine. At the time, the Chicago Tribune article, which has since been updated, was viewed around 54 million times.

There were five other Covid-related articles in the top 20 most popular links, including pieces from Unicef, Doctors Without Borders and the Washington Post.

With only one article spreading misinformation about the coronavirus, the report does not paint a particularly bleak picture of the state of fake news on Facebook. However, the company has been criticised for having hidden its own transparency report.

Facebook released the report after a leaked copy was obtained by the New York Times, which subsequently published an expose on it. Their article cited internal emails shared by Facebook executives claiming the transparency report would make the company look bad.

The company released its second-quarter report last week, when more harmless posts were among its most popular content. These included a word puzzle in top place and a photo-posting challenge in second.

The first-quarter report also found that a Facebook page belonging to the Epoch Times, a far-right news groups accused of spreading QAnon conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine content, was the platform’s 19th most-viewed page.

In a Twitter thread, Facebook policy communications manager Andy Stone defended the company’s actions.

“We’ve been getting criticism for holding an internal report until it was more favorable for us and then releasing it. Getting criticism isn’t unfair. But it’s worth taking a closer look — and making note of some of the components of the story,” he wrote.

Of course not. No one is actually suggesting this and neither am I. But it does illustrate just how difficult it is to define misinformation.

— Andy Stone (@andymstone) August 21, 2021

“On the question of the unreleased report from earlier this year and why we held it. We ended up holding it because there were key fixes to the system we wanted to make,” he added.

“We’re guilty of cleaning up our house a bit before we invited company. We’ve been criticized for that; and again, that’s not unfair.”

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Even before the pandemic, Facebook was at the centre of the misinformation debate. The platform’s role as a vector for fake news and propaganda was controversial, especially in light of claims of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election.

But it is since the arrival of Covid-19 that the threat posed by misinformation has become a major issue. False claims about the disease and the vaccine, whether part of coordinated campaigns or from individuals, is being blamed for holding back efforts to fight the coronavirus.

With over 2.5 billion profiles, Facebook’s size has brought it under scrutiny. A pair of hearings before the US Senate on either side of the 2020 Presidential Hearings discussed the role Facebook played in spreading misinformation.

In return, Facebook has introduced several measures to fight the problem. Early in the pandemic, it began posting Covid-19 advice in the timelines of people who had interacted with misinformation. However, a report from summer warned that the platform’s algorithm still meant that around 84% of articles and posts came without warnings. Facebook rolled out a similar tagging initiative when the vaccine was introduced.