Microsoft opens India's first Cybersecurity Engagement Center in Delhi NCR

San Francisco, Mar 18: Facebook said a bug in its anti-spam system temporarily blocked the publication of links to news stories about the coronavirus. Guy Rosen, Facebook's vice president of integrity, said on Twitter Tuesday that the company was working on a fix for the problem.

Users complained that links to news stories about school closings and other information related to the virus outbreak were blocked by the company's automated system.

Later on Tuesday, Rosen tweeted that Facebook had restored all the incorrectly deleted posts, which also covered topics beyond the coronavirus.

Rosen said the problems were unrelated to any changes in Facebook's content-moderator workforce. The company reportedly sent its human moderators home this week because of the coronavirus outbreak.

A representative for Facebook did not immediately respond to questions on the status of Facebook's content moderators, many of whom do not work directly for the company and are not always able to work from home.

Facebook will introduce a new notification screen on its platform that will warn users if the article they are about to share is over 90 days old, the company announced on Thursday.

“We’re starting to globally roll out a notification screen that will let people know when news articles they are about to share are more than 90 days old,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.

The social media platform had previously introduced a context button in 2018 that provides information about the sources of articles in the News Feed. Building upon that, the new feature will inform users about the timeliness of the article.

“To ensure people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to share on Facebook, the notification screen will appear when people click the share button on articles older than 90 days, but will allow people to continue sharing if they decide an article is still relevant,” Facebook said.

The social media giant stated that timeliness is important in understanding the context of an article and curbing the spread of misinformation on the platform.

“News publishers, in particular, have expressed concerns about older stories being shared on social media as current news, which can misconstrue the state of current events. Some news publishers have already taken steps to address this on their own websites by prominently labelling older articles to prevent outdated news from being used in misleading ways,” Facebook added.

Apart from this, the platform will also be testing a similar notification screen for information related to the global Covid-19 pandemic. The notification screen will provide information about the source of the link shared in a post if the link is related to information on Covid-19. It will also direct people to its previously introduced Covid-19 information centre for “authoritative” health information, it said.

Denser places, assumed by many to be more conducive to the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, are not linked to higher infection rates, say researchers.

The study, led by Johns Hopkins University, published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, also found that dense areas were associated with lower COVID-19 death rates.

"These findings suggest that urban planners should continue to practice and advocate for compact places rather than sprawling ones, due to the myriad well-established benefits of the former, including health benefits," says study lead author Shima Hamidi from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US.

For their analysis, the researchers examined SARS-CoV-2 infection rates and COVID-19 death rates in 913 metropolitan counties in the US.

When other factors such as race and education were taken into account, the authors found that county density was not significantly associated with county infection rate.

The findings also showed that denser counties, as compared to more sprawling ones, tended to have lower death rates--possibly because they enjoyed a higher level of development including better health care systems.

On the other hand, the research found that higher coronavirus infection and COVID-19 mortality rates in counties are more related to the larger context of metropolitan size in which counties are located.

Large metropolitan areas with a higher number of counties tightly linked together through economic, social, and commuting relationships are the most vulnerable to the pandemic outbreaks.

According to the researchers, recent polls suggest that many US citizens now consider an exodus from big cities likely, possibly due to the belief that more density equals more infection risk.

Some government officials have posited that urban density is linked to the transmissibility of the virus.

"The fact that density is unrelated to confirmed virus infection rates and inversely related to confirmed COVID-19 death rates is important, unexpected, and profound," said Hamidi.

"It counters a narrative that, absent data and analysis, would challenge the foundation of modern cities and could lead to a population shift from urban centres to suburban and exurban areas," Hamidi added.

The analysis found that after controlling for factors such as metropolitan size, education, race, and age, doubling the activity density was associated with an 11.3 per cent lower death rate.

The authors said that this is possibly due to faster and more widespread adoption of social distancing practices and better quality of health care in areas of denser population.

The researchers concluded that a higher county population, a higher proportion of people age 60 and up, a lower proportion of college-educated people, and a higher proportion of African Americans were all associated with a greater infection rate and mortality rate.