Facebook has a made a big deal of the fact that it’s working hard to stop the spread of fake COVID-19 content on its platform. However, according to an investigation from Consumer Reports published this week, the social media giant is doing a poor job of catching these fraudulent ads.

Consumer Reports’ Kaveh Waddell decided to test Facebook’s capabilities to catch coronavirus content by creating seven paid ads — two of which featured claims that Facebook vice president Nick Clegg specifically said were not allowed. As you might’ve guessed, the results were not encouraging.

“I put the two dangerous claims Clegg brought up, plus other false or dangerous information, into a series of seven paid ads,” Waddell wrote. “Facebook approved them all. The advertisements remained scheduled for publication for more than a week without being flagged by Facebook.”

In response, Facebook said that it has removed millions of COVID-19-related posts, and that it’s constantly striving to improve. However, experts are skeptical that the platform is really doing everything it can to address the issue.

If your system is so porous and under-resourced that it lets something like these ads through, you’ve got a problem,” UCLA professor Sarah Roberts told Consumer Reports.

Of course, a platform the size of Facebook will never be perfect when it comes to catching spam. However, it’s clear that the company has the resources to do much better than it currently is.

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