10-3-2021 11:04 a.m.
How did that Facebook become the object of criticism from Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) who, at a Senate subcommittee hearing last Thursday, said, “Facebook is just like Big Tobacco, pushing a product that they know is harmful”?
Or the subject of stories like this Sept. 14 Wall Street Journal article: Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show; or a report that stated Facebook’s algorithms push divisive content, because it pushes engagement?
Even President Biden got involved: “Anyone listening to it is getting hurt by it,” he said. “It’s killing people!”
He was referring to one of Facebook’s most burning problems: misinformation, like posts saying that the COVID vaccine causes miscarriages, or that the FDA is tracking unvaccinated people, or that the vaccine is the “Mark of the Beast.”
None of that is true. But people really are dying from misinformation.
Pogue asked Adriano Goffi, a medical director of the Altus Health System near Houston, “How often do you see somebody die of COVID?”
“Almost every shift,” he replied.
His emergency rooms have been overrun with desperately sick, unvaccinated COVID patients. He showed Pogue a massive binder representing patients just from August, most of whom refused the vaccine because they’d read bad information on social media.Â
Goffi said, “About 80 percent would come from Facebook; ‘I read on Facebook it’s poison, it’s got tracking devices in me, it makes cows sterile.’ I’ve heard all kinds of things.”
Pogue asked, “When you encounter somebody like that, where are you on the scale of, ‘This person’s an idiot,’ or, ‘I feel so sorry for this person that they’re this brainwashed’?”
“I feel really bad for individuals, because if that is your source, right, it’s hard for them to separate reality and what is being fed to them,” he replied.
“Do you have any impression of how reading this misinformation online affects the mindset of a patient?”
“It’s very powerful that you can see it and feel it at individuals when they come in and they get their swab and they’re sick, and some people, some patients even decline treatment. It’s so powerful in them that they almost even deny COVID exists in some people, because of what they’ve read.”
facebook declined “Sunday Morning”‘s request for an interview. But it heartily rejects the notion that it’s killing people, or that it’s doing nothing to fight COVID misinformation.
The company points out that it has: deleted over 20 million false posts; shut down the accounts of 3,000 repeat offenders; put warning labels on 190 million questionable posts; and promoted factual vaccine information, by building, among other things, a Vaccine Finder feature to help people get their shots.
In a statement, Facebook added, “We’re encouraged to see that for people in the U.S. on Facebook, vaccine hesitancy has declined by about 50 percent, and vaccine acceptance is high. But our work is far from finished…”
Finally, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg told CBS News’ Gayle King a few weeks ago, maybe the problem isn’t Facebook … maybe it’s America.
“If this were primarily a question about social media,” he said, “I think you’d see that being the effect in all these countries where people use it. But I think that there’s that’s something unique in our ecosystem here.”
All right. So, Facebook says it’s doing everything in its power to fight misinformation.
But researchers, journalists and Congress don’t believe it. They want Facebook to share its data on how many people are seeing the false posts.
Roose said, “And so, they were basically saying, ‘You just have to trust us on that, because we’re not going to show you the data.’ And there are teams inside Facebook that are working very hard to prevent the spread of misinformation. I think the challenge is that a lot of that data and a lot of that work stays inside the company.”
