When Facebook this week unveiled its 1st quarterly report about the most seen posts in the United States, Guy Rosen, its vice president of integrity, said the social community experienced carried out “a long journey” to be “by much the most clear platform on the net.” The record showed that the posts with the most reach tended to be innocuous information like recipes and sweet animals.

Facebook experienced prepared a equivalent report for the to start with a few months of the year, but executives in no way shared it with the public for the reason that of problems that it would appear bad for the enterprise, in accordance to internal e-mails despatched by executives and shared with The New York Periods.

In that report, a duplicate of which was supplied to The Instances, the most-seen connection was a news write-up with a headline suggesting that the coronavirus vaccine was at fault for the demise of a Florida health care provider. The report also confirmed that a Fb web site for The Epoch Instances, an anti-China newspaper that spreads proper-wing conspiracy theories, was the 19th-most-well-liked web page on the platform for the very first a few months of 2021.

The report was nearing public release when some executives, which include Alex Schultz, Facebook’s vice president of analytics and main promoting officer, debated irrespective of whether it would lead to a general public relations issue, in accordance to the inner e-mail. The company made a decision to shelve it.

“We regarded as producing the report general public before,” mentioned Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, “but because we knew the focus it would garner, exactly as we noticed this 7 days, there had been fixes to the program we desired to make.”

Mr. Stone reported Mr. Schultz had advocated releasing the original report but eventually agreed with the recommendation to hold off. Facebook introduced the report on Saturday right after the publication of this write-up.

Facebook did not say why it determined to develop a reputation report, but it has faced growing scrutiny around the info it shares with the government and the general public, especially more than misinformation about the virus and vaccines. The criticism has escalated as situations from the Delta variant of the coronavirus surged. The White Dwelling has identified as on the company to share far more facts about untrue and deceptive info on the internet site, and to do a greater task of halting its unfold. Very last month, President Biden accused the business of “killing people” by making it possible for wrong information to flow into extensively, a assertion the White Dwelling later softened. Other federal companies have accused Fb of withholding important information.

Facebook has pushed back again, publicly accusing the White Residence of scapegoating the company for the administration’s failure to attain its vaccination goals. Executives at Fb, like Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, have said the platform has been aggressively removing Covid-19 misinformation due to the fact the begin of the pandemic. The organization claimed it experienced taken off around 18 million pieces of misinformation in that time period.

But Brian Boland, a former vice president of solution marketing at Fb, reported there was lots of cause to be skeptical about facts gathered and launched by a enterprise that has had a heritage of shielding its individual interests.

“You just cannot believe in a report that is curated by a company and intended to overcome a push narrative instead than serious meaningful transparency,” Mr. Boland said. “It’s up to regulators and govt officers to convey us that transparency.”

In this week’s report, which covered public content material seen in Facebook’s Information Feed from April 1 to June 30, common one-way links provided nearby news tales, a cat GIF and a Eco-friendly Bay Packers alumni site. Well-known posts, which ended up observed by tens of millions of accounts, provided viral issue-and-remedy prompts and memes.

Most of the company’s draft report, like the a single Fb introduced on Wednesday, confirmed that the 20 most-seen one-way links on Fb in the United States have been to nonpolitical written content, like recipe websites and tales about the United Nations Children’s Fund.

But the turned down report also provided the posting about the doctor’s death in Florida. The headline of the write-up, from The South Florida Sun Sentinel and republished by The Chicago Tribune: “A ‘healthy’ health practitioner died two weeks following finding a COVID-19 vaccine CDC is investigating why.”

This hyperlink was seen by virtually 54 million Facebook accounts in the United States. A lot of commenters on the write-up lifted questions about the vaccines’ protection. Six of the major 20 sharers came from general public Fb pages that on a regular basis publish anti-vaccination articles on Facebook, according to information from CrowdTangle, a social media analytics business owned by Facebook. Other top sharers of the story included Filipino Fb pages supporting President Rodrigo Duterte, a pro-Israel Fb team and a web site called “Just the Facts,” which described by itself as “putting out the Reality even when the media won’t.”

Months afterwards, the health care examiner’s report claimed there was not plenty of evidence to say irrespective of whether the vaccine contributed to the doctor’s demise. Considerably much less people today on Fb observed that update.

The 19th-most-well-liked website page on the social network in the before report was “Trending World” by the Epoch Occasions, a publication that has promoted the QAnon conspiracy idea and unfold misleading promises about voter fraud ahead of the 2020 presidential election. The Epoch Moments is barred from promoting on Facebook due to the fact of its repeated violations of the platform’s political marketing policy.

Trending Environment, in accordance to the report, was viewed by 81.4 million accounts, a little fewer than the 18th-most-common webpage, Fox Information, which had 81.7 million material viewers for the initially a few months of 2021.

Facebook’s transparency report unveiled on Wednesday also showed that an Epoch Instances membership website link was among the the most viewed in the United States. With some 44.2 million accounts looking at the website link in April, May and June, it was about 50 % as preferred as Trending Planet in the shelved report.

Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac contributed reporting. Jacob Silver and Ben Decker contributed research.