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Facebook has achieved the strange feat of checking both sides well.
Depending on your perspective, the White House Biden is either in collusion with Facebook or at war with the company. President Biden toned down his rhetoric a bit on Sunday.
Conservatives have been suspicious of Mark Zuckerberg’s outfit for years, and now many Liberals embrace the idea that she is highly irresponsible.
Zuckerberg has been arguing since 2016 that he’s doing everything he can to get rid of lies and propaganda, but generally plays catch-up and promises to do better. And when it comes to the struggling immunization program, the stakes could hardly be higher.
As a global platform that continues to ban Donald Trump, Facebook is viewed by the right as a bastion of Silicon Valley liberalism. As a media giant wielding immense power, Facebook has drawn criticism from leftists who believe its immense market power needs to be curtailed.
In the latest melodrama, Biden was frustrated with falling vaccination rates as Covid cases more than doubled, to a daily average of 31,000, in just two weeks. His team decided to tackle the misinformation about vaccines, with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy reporting on the subject and making the rounds on television.
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Conservatives accused the White House of collusion when press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters they were “reporting problematic posts to Facebook that spread disinformation.” The wording gave the impression that Zuckerberg’s henchmen were only responding to the administration’s bidding by zapping anything Biden World found objectionable.
Psaki insisted this was not the case, that they were filing objections with Facebook as they would any other media company, and not targeting individual users.
But this raises the question of what exactly is “problematic”. Hundreds of thousands of users are on anti-vaccines, who presumably have the right to voice their opinions. Keep in mind, however, that until recently, Facebook banned anyone from expressing support for the theory that the coronavirus originated from the Wuhan lab, until establishment opinion changes. about this question.
But soon after, the White House seemed more focused on the attack on Facebook than on the collusion. Biden, who usually chooses his words carefully, told a reporter that “they are killing people” in what has become an unvaccinated pandemic.
It was way over it, and Biden made the comeback yesterday, saying he was referring to a group’s estimate that a dozen people are responsible for nearly two-thirds of the vaccine misinformation on social networks.
“Facebook is not killing people, these 12 people are there to give out misinformation,” the president said. “Anyone listening to it gets hurt because it kills people, that’s bad news.”
But there is a lot of sniping behind the scenes. A Facebook official told NBC that the White House is using the company as a “scapegoat” for failing to meet its own vaccination goals. An administration official told Fox News that Facebook had been withholding key information for weeks.
If this is not a war, it is certainly a pitched battle. And it is, literally, a matter of life and death.
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Some of the objections of those who refuse to get vaccinated are stuff from Looney Tunes, like vaccines allow Bill Gates to implant microchips in those who get vaccinated. And yet, a YouGov / Economist poll shows that 51% of people who refuse the vaccine believe in the microchip plot. I find it hard to imagine it being anything close to this number.
Ultimately, it’s an individual decision, of course, but the tragedy is that the vaccine issue has become so tangled up in partisan politics. Donald Trump created Operation Warp Speed and got the vaccine himself, but many of his supporters now resist Biden running the program.
The bottom line is that political support for these social media giants is dwindling. Trump is suing Facebook (and Twitter), Elizabeth Warren wants to break Facebook, and a lot of ordinary people no longer see Facebook as their friend.
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