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Chris J. Karr's avatar

Seems like a poorly-manufactured controversy to me. A couple of points:

1. There is no First Amendment here as long as it's the companies pushing the button on tagging or deleting offending posts. Note that the gov't isn't the only entity scanning social media, looking for offending posts:

"Researchers have found just 12 people are responsible for the bulk of the misleading claims and outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines that proliferate on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter."

"The 'Disinformation Dozen' produce 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms," said Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which identified the accounts."

"Now the vaccine rollout is reaching a critical stage in which most adults who want the vaccine have gotten it, but many others are holding out, these 12 influential social media users stand to have an outsize impact on the outcome."

"After this story published on Thursday, Facebook said it had taken down more of the accounts run by these 12 individuals."

Note that this happened back in May to no objection.

2. Doocy is clearly trolling. If you altered his question to address another recent social media issue, you'd get this:

"For how long has the Administration been spying on people’s Facebook profiles looking for ISIS recruiters and propaganda?"

I'd be VERY surprised if the folks getting their hackles up over this ALSO thought that the former administrations should have turned a blind eye toward content that favored ISIS, and convinced people to join that fight on the wrong side. There was no First Amendment concern brought up over that, so swapping "anti-vaccine propaganda" for "terrorism propaganda" doesn't change the nature of the question being asked.

That said, if this fracas convinced the Administration to back off this effort, I don't know to what extent I would mourn that. It seems like an entire swath of the American public is determined to become a cautionary tale. If they want to Jim Jones themselves, their family, and their communities, there's only so much standing in the way that we can do.

There's a limit to the paternalism that the government can exercise, and a more effective way forward that highlights individuals' responsibility for their fate would be to shift our reporting on individual and collective COVID deaths by highlighting who would have lived had they taken the shot:

"John Doe, age 47 of Springfield, died on Sunday due to COVID complications. He appears to have contracted the virus two weeks ago, and would still be alive, had he gotten his free shot at Local Healthcare Clinic two months ago when the state opened up vaccine eligibility to all adults aged 18 and older. He is survived by ... (insert remainder of standard obituary here)"

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-dozen-test-facebooks-twitters-ability-to-curb-vaccine-hoaxes

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Chris J. Karr's avatar

This may be of interest to folks here, courtesy of Charlie Warzel, who argues that we're arguing over the wrong question:

"So, is Facebook killing people? Or saving them? Depending on how you want to assign blame to a social network (which is an information amplifier) it is either doing both or it is doing neither (a version of the ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ argument). The killing/saving binary is an unhelpful frame for a conversation about Facebook because it turns an important conversation about liability into a choose-your-own-adventure argument for already interested parties. It’s a perfect little culture war scuffle that allows Joe Biden to (rightly!) pressure a company that has far too much power and far too little accountability, while allowing Facebook to play the misunderstood victim and doing little to fix its problems. Nothing changes and we move on to the next fight."

"The social media platforms allowed the groups a centralized home to develop narratives and to consolidate audiences. Having bigger, public spaces to gather online helped create a durable culture around the movement. It birthed a new set of grifters/marketers/influencers. At the same time, the platforms provided handy distribution mechanisms for these influencers and their narratives. The distribution is crucial for many reasons, one of which is that it allowed the movement to become (or at least appear) big enough to pick up the media coverage it previously couldn’t get."[1]

[1] https://warzel.substack.com/p/the-joe-biden-v-facebook-fight-is

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