President Jon Biden has backtracked on a statement he made last Friday (16/7) about Facebook and other social networks are “killing people” with the lack of oversight of news shared about Covid-19. The President of the United States asked social networks “not to take it personally”, declaring that his statement is more complicated than it seems.

Biden's statement, made for the BBC, It happened a day after Admiral Vivek Murthy, head of the United States' national health department and coordinator of the campaign to combat Covid-19, presented a report to the White House in which he asked that social networks begin to more aggressively contain misinformation about coronavirus vaccines.

Despite the successful first wave of vaccination, the United States is suffering from a portion of the population that does not want to be vaccinated or has not even returned to take the second dose of the vaccine.

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According to the US chief, the report presented by Murthy on Thursday highlights that 60% of the misinformation attacks spread by Facebook in the country would originate from 12 people and that they would be responsible for the misinformation.

“My hope is that Facebook — rather than taking it personally — will somehow consider what I’m saying and do something about misinformation,” the president said.

Reply from Facebook

Facebook is publicly expressed on US President Joe Biden’s claims that social media is “killing people” with misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. In a post on Facebook’s official blog, the social network’s vice president, Guy Rosen, stated: “the facts tell a very different story than the one promoted by the government in recent days.”

According to the executive, at a time when coronavirus cases are rising in the United States, the Biden administration has decided to find blame by pointing to social media as the problem. “While social media plays an important role in society, it is clear that we need a whole-of-society approach to ending this pandemic. And facts — not allegations — should help inform that effort,” he said.

According to Rosen, during the pandemic, Facebook worked with Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of Maryland to develop a global survey on symptoms, testing and vaccination rates for Covid-19. The results, Rosen writes, highlight that 85% of Facebook users in the United States have or want to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

In addition to Rosen's statements, over the past year, Facebook has also worked on campaigns that combat misinformation through an alert displayed on Instagram posts and on its main social network, in addition to a mechanism that asks users to check the facts before sharing them.

Through which channels you reach those people, classic and out of the box. Business Insider

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