Last month Facebook announced it would join a coalition with Twitter and more than 20 news organizations to tamp down on the proliferation of fake news on the social network. Since that announcement, conspiracy theories and explicitly fake news have continued to slip past Facebook’s algorithm.

The company did, however, confront a September 11 conspiracy theory post that it had circulated around the anniversary of the attack. It took down the entire trending topic – including on the anniversary itself – rather than selectively edit out the false stories. Adam Mosseri, the company’s News Feed product vice-president, insisted earlier this month that Facebook is not a publisher or media company.

‘Barack Obama and George W Bush rigged 2008’

facebook's promoting of fake news stories is getting out of hand. from this morning pic.twitter.com/sqJcvOaJES — Devil Smite (@redletterdave) October 23, 2016

Last week Facebook promoted a site called “Truth Kings”, which quotes from a hacked memo of John Podesta about Obama’s 2008 transition with Bush’s White House. The article seizes on the phrase “transition team” in the following quote:

Immediately after the election Secretary Paulson and other members of the Administration will likely seek to involve you and your transition team in their ongoing policy responses to the financial and housing crises. We also expect relentless interest from the press and public about your intended level of engagement with the Administration on these matters during the transition.

Every presidential campaign has a transition team, which includes staffers who help oversee the gigantic, complex handover from one administration to the next. “Why would the sitting President’s Treasury Secretary engage in transition conversations with a nominee?” Truth Kings asks. Because Paulson would have needed to urgently discuss the 2008 collapse of the financial system with the administration taking over from him and Bush.

‘Nasa live feeds’

An old ISS recording falsely posted as live. Photograph: Facebook

This week Mashable spotted several promoted “live feeds” purporting to be direct footage from a spacewalk outside the International Space Station, and confirmed with Nasa that they were fraudulent.

Several media sites, including UniLad and Viral USA posted the footage, which appears to simply be recorded video from a 2013 mission with Russian cosmonauts.

Nasa provides its own live stream footage from the space station 24/7 on the agency’s own site.

‘Cannabis kills cancer’

Photograph: Facebiook

Last year the National Cancer Institute added a line to its page of general information on cannabis and cancer treatment: “Cannabis has been shown to kill cancer cells in the laboratory.”

That appears to be the source of the HealthNetLive article promoted on Facebook, an article which elides the details of those tentative clinical trials on mice and rats. The article also does not mention the NCI’s detailed clarification: “No clinical trials of Cannabis as a treatment for cancer in humans have been found in the CAM on PubMed database maintained by the National Institutes of Health.”

The agency noted that doctors have studied cannabis as a way to manage symptoms of cancer and therapy – not as a direct means of killing cancer in humans. “There is not enough evidence to recommend that patients inhale or ingest Cannabis as a treatment for cancer-related symptoms or side effects of cancer therapy,” it added.

‘Apple’s Aladdin’s lamp’

Photograph: Facebook

Earlier this month the Washington Post caught Facebook promoting satire from an India-based site named “Faking News”. The article joked that Apple CEO Tim Cook had announced the new iPhone 8 “will be something like Aladdin’s lamp. Users will have to scratch the back of the iPhone 8 and Siri will appear before them, in person. It will respond to your commands and do activities that you ask it to do”.

At the bottom of the page is a clear disclaimer that Facebook’s algorithm did not detect: “Content of this website is a work of fiction. Readers are advised not to confuse the ‘news reports’ of Faking News as being genuine and true.”

‘Michelle Obama was born a man’

Last month Facebook promoted a link titled “Michelle Obama was born a man” – perhaps the most blatantly false claim so far boosted on the site – that leads to a 2014 YouTube video alleging the false conspiracy. The video’s entire premise is that Barack Obama once said the name Michael at a rally.

In its two years online, the video has accumulated more than 1m views, 16m fewer than a cat jumping through a box and 1.5bn fewer than an episode of Russian’s children television. It’s not worth your time.