After the government condemned the social media giant for spreading misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine, Facebook and the Biden administration conducted increasingly malicious exchanges over the weekend. On Sunday, surgeon Vivek Murthy reiterated that false stories about vaccines have become warnings of health hazards.
In a blog post on Saturday, Facebook asked the government to stop “finger pointing” and explained its work to encourage users to get vaccinated. The social network also detailed how it cracked down on falsehoods about vaccines, which the authorities said caused people to refuse vaccinations.
“The Biden administration has chosen to blame a handful of American social media companies,” Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, said in the post. “The fact is that vaccine acceptance among Facebook users in the U.S. has increased.”
Rosen added that the company’s data shows that 85% of its users in the United States have or want to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Although President Biden set a goal of vaccinating 70% of Americans by July 4, the White House failed to achieve this goal, but “Facebook is not the reason this goal was missed,” Rosen said .
Facebook’s response came after Biden strongly condemned the company. When asked on Friday about the role of social media in influencing vaccines, Biden said in unusually strong language that these platforms are “killing people.”
“Look,” he added, “the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that — and they’re killing people.”
Other White House officials have also increasingly expressed how social media amplifies vaccine lies. On Thursday, Murthy accused social media companies of not doing enough to prevent the spread of dangerous health misinformation, calling it a national health crisis that has already occurred. It promoted the vaccination of Americans. On Friday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki also condemned misinformation “that is leading to people not taking the vaccine, and people are dying as a result.” He said the White House has a responsibility to raise this issue.
On Sunday morning, Mersey also responded to an anonymous Facebook official’s accusation against CNN, saying that the government is “looking for scapegoats for missing their vaccine goals.”
Facebook and the Biden administration exchanged opinions on vaccine misinformation, and chiropractors disagree on vaccines. And those who oppose it are also very eloquent. The company officials told CNN before Murthy appeared on the news network that in private conversations, Murthy publicly criticized the company while “praising our work.” Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites have long struggled to act as expression platforms while protecting their users from false propaganda activities, such as Russia’s efforts to influence presidential elections or false statements about the pandemic.
In recent months, Facebook has cracked down on anti-vaccine advertising and vaccine false statements. In October, it said it would no longer allow anti-vaccine ads on its platform. In February of this year, the company went one step further and stated that it would delete posts with false claims about vaccines, including posts claiming that vaccines can cause autism or that it is safer for people to be infected with coronavirus than vaccinations, but misinformation about vaccines did not occur. Up. Has been wiped out. The lie that vaccines can change DNA or that vaccines don’t work has spread.
On Saturday, Rosen said in a blog post that among American Facebook users, since April, hesitation about vaccines has decreased by 50%, and acceptance of vaccines has risen by 10 to 15 percentage points, or from 70% to Above 80%.
People familiar with the matter said that people’s dissatisfaction with Facebook has increased day by day in the past few months. People familiar with the matter said that although Biden’s management asked Facebook to share information about the spread of misinformation on social networks, the company refused to cooperate.