John Oliver devoted this week’s episode of Last Week Tonight to the issue of digital misinformation and the havoc it can wreak.
The HBO host started by informing his viewers that despite the fact that 90% of monthly Facebook users are based outside the US and Canada, only 13% of the platform’s monitoring is spent on content outside of America.
He said it was the “same general attitude to misinformation that the Oscars took toward best pictures for the first 90 years of its existence”.
There was an unsettling clip played that showed a woman who was basing her Covid views from an unverified doctor from El Salvador via Facebook, rather than anything more official. Oliver called it “a pretty good reminder that thanks to social media, it is possible to silo yourself off and have very different experiences of living in America”.
Although he was envious of her lack of Fauci awareness. “It would have been great to see significantly less of him over the last year and a half,” he noted.
