Selena Slams Facebook for COVID Misinformation
American singer Selena Gomez has been using her digital presence as an influential top tier musician to hold social media companies like Facebook and Instagram accountable for their actions, or lack thereof. She has taken it up as a personal project to encourage them to improve on their “questionable practices”, a blatant lack of concern for the spread of misinformation, and the running of hate speech campaigns by their users on these platforms. The latest in the series of her actions is calling Facebook out for allowing the spread of “scientific disinformation” regarding COVID-19 vaccines.
Scientific disinformation has and will cost lives. @Facebook said they don’t allow lies about COVID and vaccines to be spread on their platforms. So how come all of this is still happening? Facebook is going to be responsible for thousands of deaths if they don’t take action now! https://t.co/IAtDpNT5Tt
— Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) December 30, 2020
In her latest tweet, Selena Gomez calls out Facebook for not taking sufficient action when its users report scientific disinformation that could cause imminent physical harm in regards to approved coronavirus vaccines within the United Kingdom. Facebook, like most digital platforms of any sort, allows and encourages its users to report harmful content, misinformation, and hate speech (amongst other content types), but the chances of the reported content actually getting taken down have been low with the probabilities dropping even lower since the pandemic caused business processes to get slowed down immensely.
In fact, the statistics by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDHate) present that in a volunteer-run campaign they carried out with 1000 bits of information, only 5% of the reported content was actually taken down, which means that 95% of incredibly harmful information and content is still floating on the internet, spreading at its own rate depending on the content creators’ coverage and outreach. While censorship can be harmful, certain levels of media control are necessary to ensure the safety and security of the general public consuming and spreading digital content.
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Credit: Guy Aroch/Fashionista
