facebooks most popular posts in us were mostly nonpolitical according to a new report facebook fearing public outcry shelved earlier report on popular poststhe company praised itself this week for being the most transparent platform on the internetcreditjeff chiuassociated presspublished aug 20 2021updated oct 25 2021when facebook this week released its first quarterly report about the most viewed posts in the united states guy rosen its vice president of integrity said the social network had undertaken a long journey to be by far the most transparent platform on the internet the list showed that the posts with the most reach tended to be innocuous content like recipes and cute animalsfacebook had prepared a similar report for the first three months of the year but executives never shared it with the public because of concerns that it would look bad for the company according to internal emails sent by executives and shared with the new york timesin that report a copy of which was provided to the times the mostviewed link was a news article with a headline suggesting that the coronavirus vaccine was at fault for the death of a florida doctor the report also showed that a facebook page for the epoch times an antichina newspaper that spreads rightwing conspiracy theories was the 19thmostpopular page on the platform for the first three months of 2021the report was nearing public release when some executives including alex schultz facebooks vice president of analytics and chief marketing officer debated whether it would cause a public relations problem according to the internal emails the company decided to shelve itwe considered making the report public earlier said andy stone a facebook spokesman but since we knew the attention it would garner exactly as we saw this week there were fixes to the system we wanted to makemr stone said mr schultz had advocated releasing the original report but eventually agreed with the recommendation to hold off facebook released the report on saturday after the publication of this articlefacebook did not say why it decided to produce a popularity report but it has faced increasing scrutiny over the data it shares with the government and the public particularly over misinformation about the virus and vaccines the criticism has escalated as cases from the delta variant of the coronavirus surged the white house has called on the company to share more information about false and misleading information on the site and to do a better job of stopping its spread last month president biden accused the company of killing people by allowing false information to circulate widely a statement the white house later softened other federal agencies have accused facebook of withholding key datafacebook has pushed back publicly accusing the white house of scapegoating the company for the administrations failure to reach its vaccination goals executives at facebook including mark zuckerberg its chief executive have said the platform has been aggressively removing covid19 misinformation since the start of the pandemic the company said it had removed