Through the spring and summer of this year, Facebook has highlighted its efforts to rein in misinformation about COVID-19 and the vaccines. “As a company, we have devoted unprecedented resources to the fight against the pandemic, pointing people to reliable information and helping them find and schedule vaccinations,” Facebook’s Vice President of Integrity, Guy Rosen, wrote in July, after President Joe Biden accused the company of “killing people” with the bogus content festering on the platform. “And we will continue to do so.” But the social media company has struggled to contain the lies and falsehoods—and the latest dispatch from the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files” published Friday points at why.
Though Mark Zuckerberg said he prioritized protecting the vaccine rollout, the company’s efforts were not much of a match for the scourge of disinformation, internal research obtained by the Journal repeatedly found. Indeed, according to the Journal, the “documents show that Facebook has often made minimal or ineffectual efforts to address the issues and plays them down in public.” Comments were a particular problem, according to research, with one internal memo describing them as a “cesspool of anti-vaccine” rhetoric.
“People in the company recognized it as a problem,” Renée DiResta, a leading researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, told the Journal. “Where is the disconnect?”
Facebook—which downplayed the research seized on by the Journal, with a company spokesman telling the paper that it “over-states the amount of misleading vaccine content”—has been under intense scrutiny for years now over its handling of bogus and toxic content. It has, to its credit, taken some significant steps toward addressing those issues. But Zuckerberg and his company have also spent as much, if not more energy deflecting criticism and working to avoid the broader reckoning over the power it wields.
The Journal’s series, which also revealed that the company’s own research showed the toll Instagram took on teenage girls, only adds to the scrutiny. But as Alex Kantrowitz observed Friday, Facebook seems to have found a solution to criticism about keeping the public in the dark: keep more staffers in the dark, too.
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Facebook Was No Match For the Scourge of COVID Lies - Vanity Fair
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