According to Andrew Bosworth, who’s a top executive at Meta which was formerly known as Facebook says that individual users, not tech platforms, shoulder the responsibility for the spread of misinformation online.
Bosworth said in an interview over the weekend with Axios on HBO that, “it is not up to Meta to stifle the views of individuals who wish to express themselves by sharing their beliefs.”
“The individual humans are the ones who choose to believe or not believe a thing; they’re the ones that choose to share or not to share a thing,” Bosworth told Axios’s Ina Fried in a snippet of the interview.
Bosworth also argued that in a democracy where everyone has the freedom to speak whatever’s on their mind and where they can choose to seek out whatever information they prefer, when Bosworth was further asked about vaccine hesitancy and if Meta will be contributing to it despite its efforts to provide authoritative information.
“You have an issue with those people,” said Bosworth, according to Axios. “You don’t have an issue with Facebook. You can’t put that on me.”
Critics have accused the corporation of aiding the propagation of false health claims, climate change denial, and the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen or illegitimate. Right-wing propaganda is also considerably more compelling than misinformation from other sources, according to research.
In several cases, Meta has taken steps to encourage users to share reliable information in their feeds. For example, the business claims that its Covid-19 portal has connected more than 2 billion people to reliable information, and that in 2020 it would utilise labels to alert consumers about news organisations’ predicted election results.
