Who?s Winning the War Between Biden and Facebook? Fox News

(On Monday, Biden said he had been referring to vaccine deniers, not Facebook, when he made the “killing” comment.)If there’s one sentence encapsulating how dysfunctional the whole debate is, it’s this, from a Sunday Wall Street Journal article: “‘The reality is that misinformation is still spreading like wildfire in our country, aided and abetted by technology platforms,’ Dr. Murthy said on Fox News Sunday.”It isn’t what Murthy said there that matters—it’s where he said it. Even the evidence incriminating Facebook tends to implicate Fox even more: Data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool, shows that right-wing media figures, including those who sow doubt about vaccines, consistently drive the most engagement.“All my research is on things that social media platforms can do to make things better,” said David Rand, a professor at MIT and one of the authors of the study testing the impact of Trump praising vaccines. He noted that “more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about Covid-19 and vaccines on Facebook” since the start of the pandemic, while the company has “removed over 18 million instances of Covid-19 misinformation.” And, he claimed, Facebook has already complied with all eight of the surgeon general’s recommendations—which would include Murthy’s suggestion that companies “give researchers access to useful data to properly analyze the spread and impact of misinformation.”In fact, Facebook notoriously does not provide access to the data needed to understand what’s happening on its platform. Nor does it provide any concrete details about its efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation.“The public has no idea what Facebook is or is not doing to combat vaccine misinformation, and doesn’t have any sense of how bad or not-bad the problem is,” said Rand, the MIT professor. “There’s lots of work being done within the company by lots of smart people to try to reduce the impact of misinformation, but they don’t really tell much about it.”Rand said platforms like Facebook should partner with outside researchers on empirical studies about what does and doesn’t work to combat vaccine misinformation—and publicize the results.