- Chris Bratton - Tech Journalist
Audio and Video calling coming to the default Facebook App and also allowing Ivermectin Ads
The earlier version of Facebook was a standalone social media platform with messaging and other core features available under a single icon. Later down the road, the platform boomed, and to cope with demand and to provide adequate service, Facebook.Inc released a separate messaging app, which is used for voice and video calls, along with messaging. Messenger and Facebook are both used in sync where the contacts or friends are the same.
A recent trial on the platform is happening as we speak. The company is letting some users use audio and video calls from the main app. Of course, they are in testing phase if it works out, but does it mean we don't need to use the messenger app anymore?
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Facebook is trying to integrate messenger to the main app among its suite of apps containing Instagram, WhatsApp. The plan is to throw WhatsApp in the mix eventually. According to a Facebook spokesperson on Monday, people should use messenger for the full-fledged voice, video, and chatting experience.
Regarding the story covering Facebook, the platform allows Ivermectin Ads when it really shouldn't. Motherboard first covered the report that medical misinformation is spreading pretty fast on social media. One of the last ones is people trying out medicine that the doctor does not prescribe or even uses animal care. Medical misinformation can cause severe damage both physically and mentally. Still, as everyone has more free time due to lockdowns, they are practising safe habits, which evolved into medical misinformation to some extent. Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic widely used as veterinary medicine recently exposed as fake treatment and a cure for Covid-19. A small group of fringe physicians are promoting the matter, which can be highly devastating if ill-used. FDA began outright begging for people to stop the medicine as Covid treatment.
Pages are being sponsored on social media platforms to sell Ivermectin as a treatment medium for the whole family. We've seen pretty disturbing things along with good ones as social media's skyrocketed, but this tops among the unfortunate events happening for people who have little idea about medicines and goes with hype.
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A series of investigations and countermeasures for promoting against the medicines are ongoing. Tech Transparency Project (TTP) aims to hold Big Tech for the liability of the action as they fail to stop the rumours, which can harm human health in the long term. In some Facebook groups, users are giving misguided medical information, which may seem professional at first as they specifically mention which form of injectable Ivermectin to buy from, where they can be found, dosage specifications, and so on. Ben Collins on Twitter in the early days pointed out the matter, and it took quite a hit and caused the discussions to move into private groups from a public place.
Unfortunately, people are trusting misinformation that was used as proof of Ivermectin's efficiency. It was tested and studied in Egypt in July, and the results were faulty with plagiarism and shaky data, which we call false information for the medical sector. The medicine has benefits, and low-quality use is "not reliable" for prevention or random trials.
Social media or Big Tech should be firm on the matter as they showed the capacity to handle such situations with political and religious beliefs. Of course, algorithms capture these text and data snippets. The platform management will have to use those data to identify false information even though they say; generally, people's data is not tracked. Grop8usa and pages should be monitored heavily in these times.
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