In a recent interview, Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, admitted the difficulties his platform faced in combating COVID-19 misinformation during the pandemic due to frequent inconsistencies by the scientific establishment.
In a video released on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Russian-American computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman.
During the interview, Zuckerberg opened up about the difficulties faced by Facebook’s fact-checkers, who are not even doctors, in censoring COVID-related misinformation.
He claimed that the ever-changing nature of science during the pandemic posed challenges to accurately discerning between factual information and harmful falsehoods.
Zuckerberg claimed that the scientific establishment’s habit of constantly updating its assumptions had eroded public trust and made it more difficult to successfully counteract disinformation.
“Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true. That stuff is really tough, right? It really undermines trust.”
WATCH:
Mark Zuckerberg says it was challenging to censor COVID misinformation because the scientific establishment was frequently wrong, which ultimately undermined public trust:
“Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health… pic.twitter.com/y0ZaX4kmCE
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) June 9, 2023
Professor Stanford School of Medicine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya blasted Zuckerberg for his role in pushing the government’s propaganda.
“Zuckerberg’s served as an enforcer for government propaganda during the pandemic. His regime of censorship on Facebook — in which falsehoods were allowed and truth censored — enabled school closures, vax mandates, toddler masking, and much else. Glad to see some humility here,” Dr. Bhattacharya wrote.
The Gateway Pundit reported that anti-vaccine groups on Facebook were using the carrot emoji to bypass the automated moderation system by the social media giant.
By replacing the word “vaccine” with a carrot emoji, some groups were able to keep their posts from being flagged by Facebook’s AI technology.
The method of using carrot emojis was exposed by Marc Owen-Jones, who claimed himself as a disinformation researcher. The groups were immediately removed for violating harmful misinformation policies.
The stories shared in this group were based on personal experience. Their stories were alarming and disturbing, knowing that thousands of people suffered adverse events, some of which resulted in death due to the experimental COVID-19 shot.
Now, a federal judge has permitted then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s office to conduct an investigation into Big Tech collusion with the Biden Administration.
Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit is a key plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the State of Missouri. The lawsuit alleges that the public statements, emails, and recently released documents, establish that the President of the United States and other senior officials in the Biden Administration violated the First Amendment by directing social-media companies to censor viewpoints that conflict with the government’s messaging on Covid-19 and election integrity concerns relating to the 2020 general election, and is a direct assault on the First Amendment.
The Biden Administration has been engaged in an ongoing campaign with Facebook and others to extinguish any and all speech that deviates from the Administration’s worldview, with the ultimately goal of removing opposing views entirely from the public square.