When a reporter from The Hill asked Joe Biden “what’s your message to platforms like Facebook?” The US President’s reply confirmed the opinion of the country’s Surgeon General: “they’re killing people.”
Biden was referring to what happens when certain groups, in this case, anti-vaxxers, are algorithmically locked into social networks that reinforce their beliefs and their echo chamber, with the sole purpose of getting people to spend more time on the platform and see more advertising.
Right now, in the United States, virtually all deaths due to coronavirus are among unvaccinated people, primarily among the anti-vaccine crowd, who are not just putting their own lives in danger, but are vectors for their families, communities, and in the final analysis even the vaccinated. In short, they are walking incubators for new strains of the virus and preventing the possibility of reaching herd immunity.
Facebook has already responded by claiming that these are “ allegations not supported by data,” and that “two billion people have used Facebook to see accurate information about vaccines and to find out when and where to get vaccinated.” In reality, a couple of searches on Facebook lead to pages run by highly organized anti-vaccine groups spreading all kinds of crazy ideas, about which the company refuses to do anything.
When the President of the United States goes on record as saying that a company’s practices are killing people, perhaps that company should consider that he is neither misinformed or especially hostile toward Facebook. Perhaps that company should consider to what extent it is endangering public health and delaying efforts to bring global pandemic under control in exchange for a few more users staying a little longer on its network and seeing a little more advertising. Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg needs to take a closer look at his priorities, and why he seems happy willing to facilitate the spread of extremely dangerous and life-threatening misinformation.
Is Facebook killing people, as the Biden says, or is it simply allowing people to exercise their right to free speech? And if the latter, then what are the limits to what one can say? How many more waves of Covid and its many variants must we endure before we realize that there is no way out of a pandemic when a tiny, but vocal minority insists on its “right” to spread a deadly disease?
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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