It is individual users, not technology platforms, who bear the responsibility for the dissemination and propagation of misinformation, hoaxes and fake news across the Internet, according to Andrew Bosworth, a senior executive at Meta , the company formerly known as Facebook. .
In an interview a few weeks ago, in a thematic program on HBO, Bosworth assured that it is not up to Meta to repress the opinions of people who wish to express themselves by sharing their ideas and beliefs, even if these are not verified, are untrue and, in most cases, they are the argument of various conspiracy theories. “It is human beings who, individually and personally, choose to believe or not believe in something; they are the ones who choose to share or not to share something,” Bosworth said on the show.
A serious problem of hoaxes and misinformation
Further pressed on the spread of hoaxes and theories by anti-vaccine groups, and asked if Meta could be contributing to such false information spreading and reaching millions of people despite the company’s efforts to provide verified information and authoritative, Bosworth argued that in a democracy where people are free to speak their minds, people can choose to search the web for the information they want to receive. “The problem is with those people, not with Facebook. Facebook cannot be blamed for deniers or anti-vaccine people.”
The company has already been accused on several occasions of facilitating the spread of false and denialist and conspiracy content such as the rejection and denial of climate change, the lie that the 2020 elections in the United States were a fraud, that President Biden is illegitimate, or that coronavirus vaccines are harmful to health, or a perverse way to control people’s minds. However, various investigations on this matter have concluded that false information created and spread from the right is much more attractive than misinformation from other sources.
In some contexts, Meta has reacted and gone to great lengths to promote and provide reliable information in the feeds of all its users. For example, the company has said that it has connected more than 2 billion people with truthful and official information about Covid-19 through the social network, and in 2020 it used hashtags to inform people about the electoral result. in real time, just as the data was appearing in the news agencies, coming from the Electoral Commission.
However, as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus began to spread rapidly around the world late last year, critics, including President Joe Biden, pointed out that continued misinformation about vaccines, fueled by hoaxes and fake news on social media, was contributing to the spike in the number of deaths from the virus.
