On Hiatus This Week—But First a Parting Raspberry for Facebook

 

This blog will be off until next weekend as yours truly will be taking a much-needed vacation. But I just can't leave for a week without calling out Facebook (FB) for trying to play the victim the Biden administration's efforts to shame it for spreading anti-vax disinformation.

First let us remember that FB has been trying to gaslight us on this topic for months. They periodically announce new "crackdowns" on anti-vaxxers whenever the political heat gets too high. If any of these "crackdowns" had actually been effective, there would be no need for another one. 

And make no mistake: If FB wanted to stop this garbage, they could. They have all the tools—the data, the graph analysis, the natural language processing, the machine learning algorithms, the compute power—to track down the vaccine mis/disinfo and get rid of it. 

But FB doesn't want to do this. They want to appear to be doing it while continuing to make money off the traffic that mis/disinfo generates. 

Yesterday, FB's Vice President for (ahem) Integrity whined in a blog post about how this is all so unfair! You can read the post and decide for yourself the merits of the argument.  

In my humble opinion it's nothing more than an exercise in whataboutism:

  • Whatabout most FB users becoming more supportive of vaccine?!?
  • Whatabout hesitancy decreasing for FB users?!?
  • Whatabout all the good vaccine info people have seen on FB?!?
Increasing support and decreasing hesitancy can be explained by trends that have little to do with Facebook's efforts. AFAIK nobody has ever said FB users never see any good vaccine info on the platform.

These statistics are nothing more than an effort to distract the audience from the issue at hand. They don't refute the claim that there is a problem with FB vaccine mis/disinfo causing vaccine resistance, which leads to illness and death. 

Do you suppose that could be why FB refuses to release information—which they clearly possess and could release—on how many of its users have been exposed to anti-vax content? 

Image by Łukasz Cwojdziński from Pixabay 

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