Facebook struck back on Saturday against President Joe Biden’s unusually blunt assertion that social media companies are “killing people” by allowing vaccine misinformation to spread on their platforms. In a blog post subtly titled, “Moving Past the Finger Pointing,” Facebook executive Guy Rosen sought to “tell a very different story to the one promoted by the administration in recent days” and suggested the White House is using Facebook as a scapegoat to explain away its own pandemic shortcomings.
“Facebook is not the reason [Biden’s July 4 vaccination] goal was missed,” Rosen wrote, referring to the administration’s aim that 70% of adults in the U.S. get at least one shot by that date. “At a time when COVID-19 cases are rising in America, the Biden administration has chosen to blame a handful of American social media companies.”
Rosen pulled together a bunch of bullet points arguing that his company is not responsible for the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. He noted that “we have been doing our part in other areas” to promote the shot and claimed that “vaccine acceptance among Facebook users in the U.S. has increased.” The social media giant appeared to downplay the influence of anti-vaccination content and misinformation on its platform, as well as its broader role in the country’s public health battle. Rosen cited the higher vaccination numbers in the UK and Canada, for example, to suggest “there’s more than Facebook to the outcome in the US” and “facts—not allegations—should help inform that effort.”
Rosen’s post did not address vaccine misinformation on Instagram, which Facebook also owns.
This back-and-forth comes as the White House, faced with declining inoculation rates nationwide and the spread of the Delta variant, is stepping up its fight against the right-wing misinformation campaign believed to be contributing to the geographic disparity in vaccination rates. (U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently declared misinformation “an urgent threat to public health.”) Administration officials have begun taking a harder line against tech companies such as Facebook and Republican officials seen as not doing enough to combat anti-vaccination content or, in the case of conspiracy theorist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, actively contributing to it.
Facebook has in the past few months made changes to clamp down on vaccine lies and limit content that actively discourages people from getting inoculated, the New York Times noted. But inaccurate information about the vaccine on social media platforms like Facebook has persisted. The Biden administration’s attempt to do something about it has been complicated by Facebook’s repeated refusal to provide “even basic data on how much vaccine misinformation exists and if the company’s efforts to stop its spread are working,” according to the Times.
Facebook is correct in noting there are multiple factors behind the spread of health misinformation. Vaccine hesitancy can be a complex and personal issue. But actors who amplify unfounded fears about the vaccine make the problem worse. That includes Fox News, whose anti-vaccine scare campaign has played out across the network, but especially on Tucker Carlson Tonight—the highest-rated show on cable as of July. While Fox has attempted to mitigate responsibility by defending Tucker Carlson as an opinion host, the network has nonetheless allowed the show to be a hotbed of vaccine resistance. Carlson’s playbook has for months involved amplifying conspiracy theories and rare negative side effects, demonizing the Biden administration’s effort to get people protected as government overreach, and broadly treating a serious public health issue as culture-war fodder.
Tensions are particularly high around vaccine misinformation because nearly all hospitalizations and deaths are among the unvaccinated. The Delta variant is wreaking particular havoc on under-vaccinated communities. In Arkansas, where only 44 percent of residents have gotten at least one shot, “hospitalizations have quadrupled since mid-May” and “more than a third of patients are in intensive care,” the Times reported. “It’s really discouraging to see younger, sicker patients,” Dr. Steppe Mette, the chief executive of Little Rock hospital, told the outlet. “We didn’t see this degree of illness earlier in the epidemic.”
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