More than 500 physicians and public health professionals in the U.S. have signed a letter demanding that Facebook divulge its data around COVID-19 disinformation.
The letter, which was initially shared exclusively with USA Today and then posted on the Doctors for America website, called the lack of transparency “deadly.”
“The recent Facebook whistleblower disclosures have confirmed what many of us have suspected for a long time: that Facebook has repeatedly stonewalled the public, lawmakers and academics over the last 18 months despite having had ‘deep knowledge’ about the scope and nature of COVID-19 and vaccine disinformation across its apps,” the letter stated.
“So many deaths could have been prevented, and we must act with haste to prevent more, particularly with vaccines becoming imminently available for young children,” it continued. “We simply cannot afford another deadly round of COVID and vaccine misinformation.”
The top three signatures were from Céline Gounder, MD, of NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City; Kavita Patel, MD, of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.; and Craig Spencer, MD, MPH, of Columbia University Medical Center in New York City.
Doctors for America said it “mobilizes doctors and medical students to be leaders in putting patients over politics on the pressing issues of the day to improve the health of our patients, communities, and nation.”
In a Twitter post about the letter, Gounder noted that healthcare professionals and public health officials “have been fighting multiple battles & multiple fronts over the course of the pandemic. Social media is yet another battleground.”
She asked why Facebook has yet to de-platform members of the “Disinformation Dozen,” referring to the report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which found that 12 anti-vaxxers are responsible for some two-thirds of anti-vaccine content on social media.
Some physicians made that list, including Joseph Mercola, DO; Sherri Tenpenny, DO; and Christiane Northrup, MD.
“These people are still out there, spreading dangerous disinformation,” Gounder tweeted.
The letter noted that on July 15, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, issued a federal advisory about the public health threat posed by misinformation.
Facebook must take “immediate, urgent action to stop the deadly spread of COVID-19 disinformation on its platforms,” the letter stressed. “Facebook must disclose all data about the scope, reach, and content of this disinformation and its impact on users for evaluation by independent public health researchers.”
The letter stated that data already released by Facebook have “fallen far short of what the public deserves to know.”
“For Facebook to achieve actual transparency, it must go beyond providing select data points to the public and provide meaningful data from its vast data trove to the public health community,” the letter continued. “This will assist experts in understanding both how disinformation has rampantly spread on the platform and how to overcome the skepticism about vaccines that has arisen from it.”
In an emailed statement to USA Today, a spokesperson for Meta (the new parent organization for Facebook) said that the company is working to distribute “reliable information” about COVID-19, and noted that vaccine hesitancy among Facebook users in the U.S. has fallen by 50% since January.
“Tracking and sharing data on the prevalence of misinformation is difficult for any subject, but especially for COVID-19 where the facts and guidance about the pandemic are updated over time. This is why no major tech company releases this data,” the spokesperson told USA Today. “Despite all of these complications, we’ve removed more than 20 million pieces of content that violate our COVID misinformation policies, permanently banned thousands of repeat offenders from our services, and connected more than 2 billion people to reliable information about COVID-19 and vaccines.”
“We will continue our dedication to ensuring billions of people are getting reliable information about COVID-19 on our services,” the Meta spokesperson said.
Source: MedicalNewsToday.com
