Vaccine Misinformation Abounds on Facebook

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KQED

News Commentary, News, Politics

4.2 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Under pressure from lawmakers and public health officials, Facebook has recently ramped up efforts to combat Covid-19 vaccine misinformation on its site by banning anti-vaxxers and marking misleading posts as false. But according to Bloomberg tech reporter Sarah Frier, those measures are doomed to fall short because the company's platform by design favors sensationalism over scientific nuance. We'll talk about the impact of covid vaccine misinformation on social media sites and what more can be done to control it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:29.6	From KQED.
0:31.6	We're going to continue now and for the rest of the hour, we're going to talk about misinformation and the pandemic.
0:38.3	We all heard lots of discussion about how social media contributed to misinformation in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections,
0:46.3	which led to Donald Trump being banned from Twitter and Facebook, among other things.
0:50.3	And we've heard a lot less, though, about social media and the pandemic but in an article
0:55.1	co-reported for Bloomberg Business Week our next guest writes that Facebook is the perfect
1:01.0	platform for conspiracy theories about the pandemic Sarah Friar joins us now to talk about that
1:06.5	Sarah welcome thank you for having me it It's an important issue. Yeah.
1:11.3	Well, tell us, you know, first of all, what did you find?
1:14.8	Well, we talked with a lot of people, particularly women who on Facebook and Instagram
1:22.7	were just bombarded with fearful messaging.
1:27.7	And that's really the takeaway we drew from this,
1:31.4	was that as much as Facebook and Instagram have tried to get rid of the people
1:37.0	who perpetually spread misinformation or, you know,
	...

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