Using AI to detect COVID-19 misinformation and exploitative content

The COVID-19 pandemic is an incredibly complex and rapidly evolving global public health emergency. Facebook is committed to preventing the spread of false and misleading information on our platforms. Misinformation about the disease can evolve as rapidly as the headlines in the news and can be hard to distinguish from legitimate reporting. The same piece of misinformation can appear in slightly different forms, such as as an image modified with a few pixels cropped or augmented with a filter. And these variations can be unintentional or the result of someone's deliberate attempt to avoid detection.