Joe Biden Has Had It Up to Here With Facebook’s COVID Misinformation

Last month, Joe Biden was pretty clear about what he thought of Facebook’s approach to COVID-19 misinformation. The social media giant, he said, is “killing people”—a declaration he walked back slightly after the company protested, telling CNN that while he “meant precisely” what he said about the platform allowing “bad information” to take root, the company itself isn’t directly causing mass death. “My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally … that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine,” Biden said at the White House. “That’s what I meant.”

But the president needn’t have backtracked. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t personally killing people, of course, and logging on to Facebook or Instagram isn’t directly exposing Americans to the coronavirus. But it is exposing them to loads and loads of bogus information, lies, and conspiracy theories that have had a deleterious impact on the effort to put the pandemic behind us. Pandemic misinformation is surging on social media, as the New York Times reported Tuesday. And while Facebook is certainly not the only platform plagued by such pernicious content, it is the most prominent. “These narratives are so embedded that people can keep on pushing these anti-vaccine stories with every new variant that’s going to come up,” Rachel E. Moran, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online conspiracy theories, told the Times. “We’re seeing it with delta, and we’re going to see it with whatever comes next.”

In fairness, Facebook has been more aggressive in recent months in seeking to control the spread of misinformation and has made a point of encouraging vaccinations. It has also “labeled and reduced the visibility” of debunked content, as Guy Rosen, the company’s vice president of integrity, wrote in a blog post last month responding to Biden’s broadside. (Other social media companies have also taken action against disinformation, including Tuesday, when Twitter again suspended Marjorie Taylor Greene for spreading lies about COVID, this time for claiming that the vaccines were “failing.”) But misinformation has nevertheless continued to spread, and Facebook has been less than forthcoming about the matter. It has reportedly declined to provide certain data related to how often misinformation was viewed and spread on its platform, and it sparked outrage when it blocked researchers from New York University studying political ads and COVID disinformation from accessing the site. 

That has frustrated the White House, which has been conducting high-level meetings with the company for months. “We’ve engaged with Facebook since the transition on this issue,” White House spokesman Mike Gwin told the Times. “We’ve made clear to them when they haven’t lived up to our, or their own, standards and have actively elevated content on their platforms that misleads the American people.” According to the Times, Biden’s “killing people” comment was the “culmination of increasingly combative meetings” between Facebook and the White House “about the spread of misinformation.” At one point, “the White House grew so frustrated by Facebook’s answers in the internal meetings that … it demanded to hear from the data scientists at the company instead of lobbyists.” 

Lawmakers have also been angered, with senators calling on the platform to explain its decision to block the NYU Ad Observatory researchers in a letter to Zuckerberg. “The opaque and unregulated online advertising platforms that social media companies maintain have allowed a hotbed of disinformation and consumer scams to proliferate,” wrote Democrats Amy Klobuchar, Mark Warner, and Chris Coons. “We need to find solutions to those problems.”

The company may be taking misinformation more seriously than it has in the past. But there are real, destructive consequences to its continuing failures. Vaccine hesitancy remains the biggest obstacle to safely regaining the normalcy that seemed so close at the beginning of the summer, before the delta variant exploded, tearing through those who have not been inoculated and forcing those who have to resume some of the precautions that defined much of 2020. Facebook and other social media companies aren’t solely to blame for all this; Biden was correct to make that part clear. But he was also correct to speak bluntly about the impact of a company that still seems uncooperative, as Facebook content continues to wreak havoc in the real world. As CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote Monday, wrenching stories from across the country have made clear that there are consequences to the bullshit that’s taken root online, with people choosing not to get vaccinated thanks to the “incomprehensible conspiracy theories, illogical memes, [and] bogus ideas” they’ve seen on social media. It’s at their peril, as those who’ve become severely infected after eschewing vaccination have belatedly—and sometimes tragically—discovered.

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