Do You Need to Disable COVID-19 Contact Tracing on Your Phone?

In mid-May 2020, the following status update screenshot circulated on Facebook, urging people with iPhones (and possibly Android devices) to “turn off … exposure COVID notifications” via a series of directions in settings:

It’s likely the image above circulated as a screenshot due to Facebook’s organization of COVID-19-related content (spaces between the letters in “COVID” also suggested attempts to circumvent the algorithms.) White text against a blue background read:

Facebook’s text-based status updates in the image-generating format above limited the available number of characters, so no contextual information appeared with...