Last month, Joe Biden was pretty clear about what he thought of Facebook’s approach to COVID-19 misinformation. The social media giant, he said, is “killing people”—a declaration he walked back slightly after the company protested, telling CNN that while he “meant precisely” what he said about the platform allowing “bad information” to take root, the company itself isn’t directly causing mass death. “My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally … that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine,” Biden said at the White House. “That’s what I meant.”
But the president needn’t have backtracked. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t personally killing people, of course, and logging on to Facebook or Instagram isn’t directly exposing Americans to the coronavirus. But it is exposing them to loads and loads of bogus information, lies, and conspiracy theories that have had a deleterious impact on the effort to put the pandemic behind us. Pandemic misinformation is surging on social media, as the New York Times reported Tuesday.
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Source: Joe Biden Has Had It Up to Here With Facebook’s COVID Misinformation | Vanity Fair