US presidents really don’t like social media although that seems to be for different reasons.
Former US president Donald Trump, for example, didn’t like that Twitter and Facebook could remove him at will and so he tried to push through legislation that would prevent them from doing that again.
Current US president, Joe Biden, also seems to have a dislike of social media following a brief, yet important statement made at the weekend.
When asked about COVID-19 misinformation and social media Biden responded with, “They’re killing people. Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. They’re killing people.”
Is he right to say that?
In a study published in Nature in October 2020, researchers looked at if or how social media facilitates the spread of misinformation.
The study is rather interesting and you can read it in full here but the findings aren’t exactly conclusive.
“Our findings suggest that the interaction patterns of each social media combined with the peculiarity of the audience of each platform play a pivotal role in information and misinformation spreading,” reads the report.
This in turn means that the rate at which information (or misinformation) is spread depends on the audience, the interactions that take place on that platform and of course how the users engage in a particular topic.
In short, it’s a complex problem that can’t simply be boiled down to “they’re killing people”, as both users, operators and even lawmakers have a responsibility to ensure platforms uphold a particular standard.
Facebook hits back
Following Biden’s remarks, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, Guy Rosen, hit back in a big way.
The VP outlined the many ways Facebook has been fighting misinformation on its platform including linking users to reliable information from reputable sources, pointing folks to nearby vaccination clinics and working to reduce vaccine hesitancy.
“For people in the US on Facebook, vaccine hesitancy has declined by 50%; and they are becoming more accepting of vaccines every day,” says Rosen.
“The data shows that 85% of Facebook users in the US have been or want to be vaccinated against COVID-19. President Biden’s goal was for 70% of Americans to be vaccinated by July 4. Facebook is not the reason this goal was missed,” the VP added.
But we also recognise that Facebook can’t be an arbiter of truth if it doesn’t know the truth and that’s why, as Rosen rightly points out, COVID-19 and the misinformation associated with it requires a whole of society approach.
To our mind, the likes of Facebook and Twitter have embraced this approach to solving the problem and while more work needs to be done, painting mainstream social media with the same brush used to identify fringe collectives on Gab or GETTR is a bad idea.
We get it though, there is this unspoken need to call somebody the big bad in all of this and social media is an easy and seemingly sensible target.
However, we’d do well to address things like misinformation leading to vaccine hesitancy in more robust ways than answering a reporter’s question en route to a helicopter flight.
