Facebook executive accuses users of spreading misinformation

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“Human beings” are to blame for spreading false information on Facebook, a senior company official said in a new interview on Sunday.

Andrew Bosworth, who has built a reputation in Silicon Valley as a trusted assistant to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has crushed critics who say the company has amplified misinformation about COVID-19 and other subjects.

“Human beings are those who choose to believe or not to believe something. They are the ones who choose to share or not to share a thing, ”Bosworth said in an interview published Sunday with“ Axios on HBO ”.

Bosworth appeared in the interview to equate regulating disinformation on the platform with removing content that is just plain unfavorable in the eyes of some people.

“I don’t feel at all comfortable saying they don’t have a voice because I don’t like what they said,” he told Axios.

Bosworth joined Facebook in 2006 and has worked on a host of key initiatives, including increasing ad revenue. Next year, he’ll be elevated to CTO of Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

Pressed by Axios in the interview about the company’s role in spreading at least some misinformation that could have contributed to vaccine reluctance or crippled the global response to the pandemic, Bosworth again dismissed the blame it on people who he said wanted to see information like that.

Andrew Bosworth equated the regulation of disinformation with the removal of content that is just plain unfavorable in the eyes of some people. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images

“It’s their choice. They are allowed to do this. You have a problem with these people. You don’t have a problem with Facebook. You can’t put that on me, ”he said.

“People want this information,” he added.

“I don’t believe the answer is ‘I will deny these people the information they are looking for and I will apply my will to them.'”

“At some point the responsibility rests, and should be, in any meaningful democracy, with the individual. “

Bosworth then asked if Facebook could define for itself what disinformation is.

“Our ability to know what disinformation is itself is in question and I think so, so I am very uncomfortable with the idea that we have sufficient fundamental correctness even in our centers of. most scientific studies, to exercise this type of power over a citizen, another human, and over what they want to say and who they want to listen to, ”he said.

In May, Facebook reversed its decision to report posts claiming COVID-19 was man-made.Richard Drew / AP

Notably, Facebook weighed in on what it saw as disinformation earlier in the pandemic. Facebook in February banned posts claiming COVID-19 was man-made or fabricated.

The site’s fact-checkers slapped a ‘false information’ notification on the actions of an opinion piece published on February 23 by Steven Mosher, which said the United States could not be trusted by history from China on the origins of COVID-19 and argued that the virus could have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.

But in May, the company reversed the decision and said it would no longer delete messages on its platform claiming COVID-19 was man-made, after President Joe Biden ordered intelligence agencies Americans to investigate whether the virus came from a Chinese laboratory.

Andrew Bosworth joined Facebook in 2006 and is expected to take on the role of Meta’s CTO next year. Axios on HBO

Bosworth, who often shares his take on social media and tech in general on his blog, has previously suggested that Facebook can do harm, but the good outweighs the bad.

In a leaked memo in 2016, he wrote about the belief of some Facebook employees that the platform is “de facto good”, although it could lead to poor results, such as a “coordinated terrorist attack on us. tools”.

Bosworth and Zuckerberg then backtracked, saying the memo was intended to criticize Facebook employees for believing this.

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