She added, “These findings underscore the fundamental flaw in Facebook’s business model: it values lies over lives.”

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), a top tech policy wonk on Capitol Hill, voiced concern that viral misinformation is spreading in private Facebook groups as the company pushes to make them more prominent on the platform.

“We continue to see Facebook Groups and Pages serving as major vectors for harmful activity — including medical misinformation and health scams — even as Facebook has continued to prioritize Group activity in users’ feeds and promote Group membership to users,” he said.

Facebook’s response: “We share Avaaz’s goal of limiting misinformation, but their findings don’t reflect the steps we’ve taken to keep it from spreading on our services,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement ahead of the report’s release.

Stone added that the platform has “directed over 2 billion people to resources from health authorities” and “applied warning labels to 98 million pieces of COVID-19 misinformation.”

What’s next: Avaaz is calling for Facebook to show corrections from independent fact-checkers to all users who have seen health misinformation on the platform, which the group said could significantly decrease their belief in those falsehoods. And Avaaz is calling for the company to tweak its algorithms to downgrade posts containing phony health news.

In her statement, Eshoo said she backed those recommendations.