Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
The fact that Facebook can distribute dangerous amounts of misinformation around the world in the blink of an eye is not a new problem, but the social network’s ability to do so got more than the usual amount of attention during the past week. President Joe Biden told reporters during a White House scrum that Facebook was “killing people” by spreading disinformation, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories about COVID-19, and in particular about the efficacy of various vaccines. As Jon Allsop reported in the CJR newsletter on Wednesday, Biden backtracked somewhat on his original statement after some pushback from the company and others: Facebook said that the country needed to “move past the finger pointing” when it comes to COVID disinformation, and that it takes action against such content when it sees it. Biden responded that his point was simply that Facebook has enabled a small group of about a dozen accounts to spread disinformation that might be causing people to avoid getting vaccinated, and that this could result in an increase in deaths.
Biden appears to have gotten his information about this “disinformation dozen” from a group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which came out recently with research showing that the bulk of the disinformation around COVID-19 and vaccines appears to come from a handful of accounts. The implication of the president’s comment is that all Facebook has to do is get rid of a few bad apples, and the COVID disinformation problem will be solved. As Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times put it, however, Biden “reduced the complex scourge of runaway vaccine hesitancy into a cartoonishly simple matter of product design: If only Facebook would hit its Quit Killing People button, America would be healed again.” While Biden’s comments may make for a great TV news hit, solving a problem like disinformation at the scale of something like Facebook is much harder than he makes it sound, in part because it involves far more than just a dozen bad accounts. And even the definition of what qualifies as disinformation when it comes to COVID has changed over time.
As Jon Allsop described yesterday, part of the problem is that media outlets like Fox News seem to feel no compunction about spreading “fake news” about the virus in return for the attention of their viewers. That’s not a problem Facebook can fix, nor will ridding the social network of all hoaxes about COVID or vaccines make much of a dent in the influence of Fox’s hysteria — which information researcher Yochai Benkler of Harvard’s Berkstein Center for Internet and Society has argued was much more influential during the 2016 election than any social-media network. But even that’s just the tip of the disinformation iceberg. One of the most prominent sources of COVID and vaccine disinformation is a sitting US member of Congress: Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia. Another, Robert F. Kennedy, is a member of one of the most famous political families in US history, and his anti-vaccination conspiracy theories put him near the top of the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s “disinformation dozen” list. What is Facebook supposed to do about their repeated misstatements?
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