Facebook: It’s Not Our Fault People Want COVID Misinformation

Over the summer, as bogus information about COVID and vaccines spread aggressively across social media, President Joe Biden’s irritations with Facebook boiled over. “They’re killing people,” he said. The president soon backtracked, softening his position a bit. But his frustration was understandable; the company has struggled to contain dangerous misinformation on the platform, and has been characteristically lacking in transparency about it, both with the public and policymakers.

Facebook, which has since reorganized under the umbrella company Meta and has been trying to overcome months of terrible PR, has announced various efforts to combat the scourge of COVID lies and other toxic content. But as usual, the biggest obstacle to them addressing the problem is their refusal to truly acknowledge what the problem is.

Speaking in an interview Sunday with Axios on HBO, longtime Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth brushed off responsibility for the platform’s role in allowing misinformation about public health and politics to proliferate, claiming that lies and conspiracy theories were problems with society and individuals rather than the company. “Individual humans are the ones who choose to believe or not believe a thing,” Bosworth said. “They are the ones who choose to share or not share a thing.”

“That’s their choice. They are allowed to do that,” Bosworth continued. “You have an issue with those people. You don’t have an issue with Facebook.”

To some extent, Bosworth’s point has merit. Facebook didn’t invent misinformation and conspiracy theories. Facebook isn’t forcing people to digest this kind of toxic content. And individuals certainly bear responsibility for what they spread and believe, as Bosworth told Axios. “At some point the onus is, and should be in any meaningful democracy, on the individual,” he said.

But it’s also disingenuous to suggest that Facebook bears no responsibility. Indeed, even if Facebook didn’t invent these problems, it has clearly exacerbated them. Misinformation always existed, but Facebook has helped to amplify it. There have always been conspiracy theories, but Facebook has given them echo chambers in which to flourish. And while the company has suggested users gravitate to bad information entirely of their own volition—“people want that information,” Bosworth told Axios—it minimizes the extent to which its algorithms lead them deeper and deeper down these rabbit holes.

It would be bad enough if Facebook were passively allowing bad actors to run amok. But the company has actually appeared to benefit from these bad actors, with inflammatory and dangerous content driving engagement, as whistleblower Frances Haugen told Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes in October. “There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” Haugen said. “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money.” But Bosworth, who is helping to lead the company into the “metaverse,” still won’t acknowledge those issues, continuing to cast Facebook as an essentially neutral platform that occasionally gets used for ill. “You can’t put that on me,” he told Axios.

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