Selena Gomez is disappointed with Facebook and the social media giant's failure to stop the spread of misinformation about 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," Gomez tweeted on Tuesday (December 29). "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!"
Gomez's tweet was accompanied by a post from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, where the organization's CEO, Imran Ahmed, spoke to BBC News about the responsibility and disappointment of social media companies to sift through inaccurate COVID-19 information in the U.K. "We took a thousand bits of misinformation and got volunteers to report it using the platform’s own reporting systems," Ahmed said during his appearance. "And less than 5% of it was taken down. The truth is we’ve been gaslit by the social media companies, they say they’re doing their utmost. But in reality, they’re doing absolutely nothing."
In a statement to Billboard, Facebook reacted to Gomez’s post, writing, "We are committed to reaching as many people as possible with accurate information about vaccines, and launched partnerships with WHO and Unicef to do just that. We've banned ads that discourage people from getting vaccines and reduced the number of people who see vaccine hoaxes verified by the WHO and the CDC. We also label Pages and Groups that repeatedly share vaccine hoaxes, lower their posts in News Feed, and do not recommend them to anyone. We continue to remove accounts and content that violate our policies and are the only company to work with over 80 fact-checking organizations around the world."
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