Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, take a look back at Facebook’s history of missing the mark on content moderation, learn more about the “LGBTQ state of emergency,” and cover more media misses.
Zuckerberg Dodges Blame for Facebook’s Covid-Related Censorship
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook parent company Meta, said in a recent interview that the scientific “establishment” asked the social media site to censor “misinformation” related to Covid-19 that ultimately turned out to be true.
Zuckerberg spoke out about the “really tricky” task of moderating content on the site when some posts may be false but not outright harmful. “So it’s like, alright, are you going to censor someone for just being wrong, if there’s no kind of harm implication of what they’re doing?’” Zuckerberg said on the Lex Fridman Podcast last week.
“Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier on in the pandemic, where there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions, and, unfortunately, I think a lot of the establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts,” Zuckerberg said.
He went on to say that requests from members of the scientific community to censor information on the platform “undermines trust” in officials.
The “establishment,” he said, asked “for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”
In February 2021, Facebook announced it would censor what it called false and misleading health claims, including assertions that Covid-19 is “man-made or manufactured.” The site reversed course just three months later after the idea that the virus may have originated from a lab-leak in Wuhan, China, began to enter the mainstream.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps,” a spokesperson said at the time. “We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.”
In the interview last week, Zuckerberg took little-to-no accountability for his platform’s role in obliging these requests from the establishment. Zuckerberg said in 2021 that his platform had removed 18 million posts containing alleged “misinformation” about Covid-19.
Attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana alleged in court filings last year that Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, communicated with Zuckerberg directly “regarding public messaging and the flow of information on social media about the government’s COVID-19 response.”
Zuckerberg offered to coordinate with Fauci on messaging around the virus to “make sure people can get authoritative information from reliable sources.”
The Meta CEO suggested the information could be shared in a “hub” that would be put at the top of Facebook, an idea that Fauci called “very exciting.”
The attorneys general went on to allege that Facebook chose to designate Covid-19 information as “false” based solely on whether the claim was in line with a set of “facts” adopted by Fauci and the CDC.
Email correspondence released as part of the lawsuit in January revealed the Biden White House pressured Facebook to censor a viral video posted by Tucker Carlson in 2021 that mentioned adverse side effects from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
White House officials had a phone call with Facebook representatives to discuss how to address Carlson’s content. Facebook told White House director of digital media Rob Flaherty that it demoted the video by 50 percent, pending a 7-day fact-checking period.
Facebook at first resisted the White House’s insistence that the site remove the video altogether. The platform said the video did not violate its misinformation policies because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine had been connected to the risk of a rare and dangerous clotting condition called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS).
“Following the government’s decision yesterday, we are allowing claims that the Johnson and Johnson vaccine causes blood clots, but we still do not allow categorical claims that it or other vaccines are unsafe or ineffective,” Facebook told then-White House senior advisor for Covid-19 response Andy Slavitt.
Facebook responded by noting Carlson’s video was not being recommended to users and included a link to Facebook’s Covid-19 information hub which said, “Covid-19 vaccines go through many tests for safety and effectiveness and then are monitored closely.”
Flaherty remained unimpressed: “The second half of the segment is raising conspiracy theories about the government hiding that all vaccines aren’t effective.”
“Not for nothing but last time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection,” Flaherty added, referencing the January 6 Capitol riot.
And while Zuckerberg seems to pawn Facebook’s bad decisions off on the “health experts,” as recently as October 2022 it appeared the site still hadn’t learned its lesson: it was operating a designated portal through which the Department of Homeland Security could directly report claims of “disinformation,” according to a report from The Intercept last year.
While the agency axed its concept of a “Disinformation Governance Board,” it continued to lobby tech companies over “misinformation” and “disinformation” about “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine,” the report said.
Meanwhile a new report from The Telegraph reveals Facebook was also receiving requests to remove “disinformation” from officials across the pond.
The U.K.’s Counter Disinformation Unit was in “hourly” contact with social media sites, according to Sarah Connolly, the official who was in charge of the operation. One of the unit’s main roles was to pass information over to Facebook and Twitter to “encourage… the swift takedown” of posts.
But the Covid misinformation is far from the first time Facebook has dropped the ball on content moderation.
Zuckerberg spoke to Joe Rogan in August about the platform’s decision to suppress stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election, saying the decision was made after the FBI warned the site to keep an eye out for Russian “misinformation.”
The “distribution” of the report was suppressed for “five or seven” days on the platform, Zuckerberg said. He couldn’t say how many users didn’t see the story as a result, but said the impact was “meaningful.”
While the FBI didn’t tell Facebook to censor the laptop specifically, the site decided it “fit the pattern” of Russian propaganda that it had been warned about by the bureau.
Headline Fail of the Week
Charles Blow declared an “LGBTQ State of Emergency” last week in the pages of the New York Times and told readers there is a “pall over Pride.”
“As the L.G.B.T.Q. community celebrates Pride Month, we are besieged by a malicious, coordinated legislative attack” by, you guessed it, Republicans.
“The way this kind of terrorism works is that it not only punishes expression, condemns identities and cuts off avenues for receiving care but also creates an aura of hostility and issues grievous threats. It’s like burning a cross on someone’s lawn: It’s an attempt to frighten people into compliance and submission,” he wrote.
Blow’s declaration comes after the Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for LGBT people in the U.S. last week.
“This is a terror campaign against our community,” Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and chief executive of GLAAD, told Blow.
Media Misses