How Facebook Hobbled Mark Zuckerberg s Bid to Get America Vaccinated – WSJ
In the weeks before Mr. Zuckerberg made his announcement, another memo said initial testing concluded that roughly 41% of comments on English-language vaccine-related posts risked discouraging vaccinations. Users were seeing comments on vaccine-related posts 775 million times a day, the memo said, and Facebook researchers worried the large proportion of negative comments could influence perceptions of the vaccines safety.
Even authoritative sources of vaccine information were becoming cesspools of anti-vaccine comments, the authors wrote. That s a huge problem and we need to fix it, they said.
Facebook s goal of protecting the rollout of the Covid vaccines, described in one memo as a top company priority, was a demonstration of Mr. Zuckerberg s faith that his creation is a force for social good in the world. But the effort ended up demonstrating the gulf between his aspirations and the practical reality of the world s largest social platform where the company s aims can bring it into conflict with its own users.
Despite Mr. Zuckerberg s effort, a cadre of antivaccine activists flooded the network with what Facebook calls barrier to vaccination content, the memos show. They used Facebook s own tools to sow doubt about the severity of the pandemic s threat and the safety of authorities main weapon to combat it.
By this summer, the prevalence of false and misleading vaccine information on Facebook prompted a public scolding from President Biden, who said the falsehoods were killing people.
The vaccine documents are part of a collection of internal communications reviewed by the Journal that offer an unparalleled picture of how Facebook is acutely aware that the products and systems central to its business success routinely fail and cause harm.
Facebook s own research lays out in detail how its rules favor elitesnegative effects on teen mental healthalgorithm fosters discorddrug cartels and human traffickers use its services openly.
The documents show that Facebook has often made minimal or ineffectual efforts to address the issues and plays them down in public.
via www.wsj.com
I wonder how this WSJ series is faring in Facebookâs news feed.