For my Week 10 reading, I decided to go over the article, Facebook is having a tougher time managing vaccine misinformation than it is letting on, leaks suggest (Links to an external site.)
Facebook has a massive audience. “As of May last year, the “most active” civic groups in the United States “have been the hundreds of anti-quarantine groups in addition to the standard set that have been most active for months/years (Trump 2020, Tucker Carlson, etc.),” according to a May 18, 2020 post to Facebook’s internal site.”
According to the article, they argue that they are unaware of the scope of comments. Which, in my opinion, they could undoubtedly control but have opted not to do so. I have a hard time believing that they have a lack of resources to do this. Personally, I think Facebook has complete control over every area of their website, so they could govern the comments if they truly wanted to. However, I did notice that this comment was from February of 2021 so that might have changed over the past almost year and a half.
“One flag from UNICEF was the disparity between FB and IG,” one comment on the report stated, “where they said this: ‘One of the ways we manage these scenarios on Instagram is though pinning top comments. Pinning helps us highlight our top comment (which will almost always be a link to helpful vaccine information) and also highlight other top comments which are pro-vaccine.'” This is another example of how they can control comments, in a way. I do believe that misinformation is spread more widely today than it was in the days before social media. This is primarily due to how quickly information can circulate on the many social media websites that we have. The important part of this whole conversation is what we do with information that is presented to us. We can go back and forth all day on if social media is doing a good enough job filtering out disinformation. But, we’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves and do our own research and “fact-checking.”
