[ad_1]
Facebook rebutted President Joe Biden’s remarks on Saturday that social media platforms are “killing people” by allowing disinformation about coronavirus vaccines on their services and argued that the acceptance of vaccines among its users has in increased in the United States
In a blog post, Guy Rosen, vice president of Facebook integrity, highlighted data suggesting that vaccine reluctance among its US users has decreased by 50%, and 85% of users said that they had been or would like to be vaccinated against Covid-19.
“These facts and others tell a very different story from that promoted by the administration in recent days,” Rosen wrote.
Rosen also pointed to the narrowly missed goal by the Biden administration to vaccinate 70% of Americans by July 4, arguing that Facebook “is not the reason that goal was missed.”
Facebook’s response comes after the president was asked on Friday on the South Lawn of the White House what his message to companies like Facebook was regarding Covid disinformation. In response to the question, Biden replied, “They kill people.”
“I mean they really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that’s – they’re killing people,” the president said, echoing the press secretary’s earlier comments. of the White House Jen Psaki.
Psaki, during a press briefing last week, said the Biden administration was reporting problematic Facebook posts that spread misinformation, including false information that the Covid-19 vaccine was causing infertility.
The press secretary urged Facebook and other social media companies to tackle disinformation, including publicly sharing data regarding the impact of disinformation on their services, promoting quality news sources in their flow algorithm and taking faster action against damaging posts.
Deaths from Covid-19 are on the rise again in the United States, as the delta variant largely affects unvaccinated pockets across the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The United States is reporting an average of 530,000 vaccinations per day over the past week.
Read the full Facebook blog post here:
At a time when COVID-19 cases are on the rise in America, the Biden administration has chosen to blame a handful of American social media companies. While social media plays an important role in society, it is clear that we need a holistic societal approach to end this pandemic. And the facts – not the allegations – should help inform this effort. The point is that the acceptance of vaccines among Facebook users in the United States has increased. These and other facts tell a very different story from that promoted by the administration in recent days.
Since April 2020, we have been collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland on a global survey to gather information on symptoms, tests, vaccination rates and more of COVID-19. It is the largest survey of its kind, with over 70 million responses in total and over 170,000 responses per day in over 200 countries and territories. For people in the US on Facebook, vaccine reluctance has decreased by 50%; and they accept more and more vaccines every day.
Since January, acceptance of the vaccine by Facebook users in the United States has increased by 10-15 percentage points (70% → 80-85%) and racial and ethnic disparities in acceptance have decreased significantly (some of the populations that had the lowest acceptance in January have seen the largest increases since). The results of this investigation are public, and we have shared them – along with other data requested by the administration – with the White House, the CDC and other key federal government partners.
Data shows that 85% of Facebook users in the United States have been or wish 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.
In fact, increased acceptance of vaccines has been seen on and outside of Facebook, with many leaders in the United States working to make it happen. We have used similar tactics in the UK and Canada, which have similar Facebook usage rates as the US, and these countries have achieved over 70% immunization of eligible populations. All of this suggests that there is more to the bottom line than Facebook in the United States.
Today’s immunization efforts rightly focus on increasing access and availability for those harder to reach. That’s why we recently expanded our pop-up vaccination clinics to low-income and underserved communities. To help promote reliable vaccine information to communities with limited access to vaccines, we use the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index. This is a publicly accessible dataset that crisis and health responders often use to identify communities most likely to need support, as areas of higher vulnerability have had coverage. lower COVID-19 vaccine.
We have also done our part in other areas:
- Since the start of the pandemic, more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook. This includes more than 3.3 million Americans using our vaccine finder to find out where to get a COVID-19 vaccine and make an appointment to do so.
- Over 50% of people in the United States on Facebook have seen someone use the COVID-19 vaccine profile frameworks, which we developed in collaboration with the United States Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC. From what we have seen, when people see a friend say that they have been vaccinated, it increases their perception that the vaccines are safe.
- We continue to encourage everyone to use these tools to show their friends that they have been vaccinated. For those who are hesitant, hearing from a friend who has been vaccinated definitely has more of an impact than hearing from a big business or the federal government.
And when we see misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, we take action against it.
- Since the start of the pandemic, we have removed more than 18 million cases of COVID-19 misinformation.
- We’ve also tagged and reduced the visibility of over 167 million pieces of COVID-19 content debunked by our network of fact-checking partners so that fewer people see it and, when they see it, they have context. full.
In fact, we’ve already taken action on the Surgeon General’s eight recommendations on what tech companies can do to help. And we continue to work with health experts to update the list of false claims that we are removing from our platform. We publish these rules for anyone to read and review, and we update them regularly as new trends emerge.
The Biden administration calls for a comprehensive societal approach to this challenge. We agree. As a company, we have devoted unprecedented resources to fighting the pandemic, directing people to reliable information and helping them find and schedule vaccinations. And we will continue to do so.
–CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
[ad_2]
Source link