Mark Zuckerberg’s recrimination of the scientific establishment for one of its actions during the COVID-19 pandemic

Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg stated that the scientific establishment censored the social network during the COVID-19 pandemic when asked him to delete posts about the coronavirus claiming that they contained misinformation that actually ended up being “debatable” or even “true”.

These comments from Zuckerberg were given on the latest episode of the researcher’s podcast IT Lex Fridmanwhere the businessman addressed the “problems and challenges” of the implementation of the policies that his platform has implemented to combat misinformation and promote a safer environment for its users.

The CEO of Meta, the parent company of the social networks Facebook and Instagram, commented that one of the most difficult moments in this matter was in 2021, in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. By then, Facebook had been forced to delete 18 million posts that contained misinformation about the virus.

“If we see harmful misinformation, we remove it, it goes against our policy”had assured about it in dialogue with the presenter of the American chain CBS Gayle King, to whom he also recognized that his control system is not perfect and underlined his efforts to improve it day by day.

“Did we detect everything? Of course there are mistakes that we make or areas where we need to improve but that is the best number we have in terms of what we have seen and what our systems have been able to detect”, he continued declaring.

However, Zuckerberg defended, for his part, that not in all cases the observations of the establishment in the scientific community have been accurate and warned that removing non-wrong content can constitute a form of censorship and “undermine trust”.

He considered that it is “really delicate” when some content is false “but may not be harmful”. “So, it’s like ‘okay, are you going to censure someone for being wrong if there isn’t some kind of damaging implication of what they’re doing?’“, argument.

To reinforce his argument, the businessman used a recent example.

“Just take some of the issues surrounding the coronavirus, early in the pandemic, when there were real health implications but not the time to fully examine many of the scientific assumptions. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the facts on this issue were doubted by a large part of the scientific establishment,” he said.

That is why this group urged him to silence these dubious facts before they could be verified and this, according to Zuckerberg, damaged his credibility with the public.

However, in 2022, a group of United States attorneys general collected evidence that the businessman worked together with the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Dr. A.S. Anthony Faucifor “discredit and suppress” the theory that the coronavirus could have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan while the US Department of Energy concluded earlier this year that the pandemic – most likely – leaked from a laboratory in this Chinese city.

In the podcast, Fridman also addressed the question of nuance and depth of information available on the internet and the effect of artificial intelligence in this. According to the computer scientist, this could be affected and even “lost” as a result of content moderation promoted by governments and institutions. “It’s a scary thought,” he said.

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