[ad_1]
“All of my research is about the things that social media platforms can do to improve things,” said David Rand, a professor at MIT and one of the authors of the study, examining the impact of Trump praising vaccines. “But I think television and radio, especially conservative television and radio, are basically getting a free ticket right now, even if they do amazing damage.”
The Biden administration’s criticism of Facebook is a double victory for Fox News. Not only is the network responsible for the vaccine gap, it feeds the powerful right-wing narrative about the government and Big Tech to silence the Conservatives. “I think that kind of coordination between the big government and the big monopoly corporation, boy, is a scary thing. And it’s really censorship,” said Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley he said Thursday — where else? – Fox News. That sense of anger easily kept the weight of the Conservative media, scientists and Republican lawmakers throughout the weekend, as Ted Cruz said, “all we were afraid we could do is the will to oppress free speech, to oppress the Constitution, to use government power to silence you.” .
It’s easy to see why the White House would spend playing political capital on Facebook instead of Fox News: Facebook can really listen. Biden has no leverage over the right media. When a Fox News host questions the safety or wisdom of the vaccine, it does not fail in enforcement; it’s tonight’s schedule. Many people on Facebook would prefer not to be concerned about poisoning America’s public health information environment.
Which, according to Facebook, they are not. In one blog post last week, Facebook Vice President of Integrity Guy Rosen argued that Facebook has definitely been a force to be reckoned with in terms of vaccines. He noted, “More than 2,000 billion people have seen authoritarian information about Covid-19 and vaccines since the Facebook pandemic began, and the company has“ removed more than 18 million cases of Covid-19 misinformation. ”And he says Facebook has already filled them out. all eight of the surgeon general’s recommendations — Murthy’s suggestion would be that companies “allow researchers to obtain useful data to properly analyze the spread and impact of misinformation.”
In fact, Facebook does not provide access to the data needed to understand what is happening on its platform. Note, for example, that Rosen’s blog post does not mention how many times users have seen reliable information about Covid or vaccines. Facebook publishes statistics related to posts (likes, shares, etc.) but refuses to disclose data about “reach,” which is how much people see a piece of content. It does not provide specific details about the effort to reduce the spread of misinformation.
“The public doesn’t know what Facebook does or doesn’t do to deal with vaccine misinformation, and it doesn’t make any sense how bad or not the problem is,” said MIT professor Rand. “A lot of work is being done within the company to try to reduce the impact of misinformation on many smart people, but they don’t say much about it.”
Rand said platforms like Facebook should collaborate with outside researchers to address vaccine misinformation about what it does and what doesn’t work and share the results. He reported that Facebook vaccine publications have enough data to measure how they affect real-world behavior. “They’re doing randomized controlled trials on vaccine misinformation every day, they just think like that,” he said.
That is the irony, giving some To figure out how to deal with the problem, it seems that Facebook has struck the worst possible balance between transparency and secrecy. YouTube makes little information available to researchers, it helps fly under the political and regulatory radar despite its tremendous importance. Meanwhile, Facebook is providing enough data via CrowdTangle to researchers and reporters to frustrate the company, but then proves it would claim that.
[ad_2]
Source link
