Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken heat from liberals in the media and Big Tech for not doing enough to undermine the president, but his weaponization of COVID-19 is damning.
Zuckerberg blasted Trump during an interview with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci about the recent alleged rebound of the COVID-19 pandemic. Zuckerberg has been criticized for not doing more to censor President Donald Trump, but he took an opportunity in the July 15 interview to slam the sitting president’s response to the virus in recent months.
Zuckerberg stated, "At this point, it is clear that the trajectory in the U.S. is significantly worse than many other countries and that our government and this administration have been considerably less effective in handling this." U.S. intelligence, however, has revealed that foreign countries like China have deliberately hidden their death toll. China even lied about the severity of the virus in order to get a head start on “stockpiling crucial medical supplies,” NBC News reported.
The Facebook CEO responded to Fauci’s own grim assessment of America’s performance in handling the outbreak that he was being “quite generous” in his “description of the government’s response.” He went on to say that his assessment of the United States’ situation was far more critical:
“Now that we are here in July, I just think that it was avoidable, and it’s really disappointing that we still don’t have adequate testing; that the credibility of our top scientists, like yourself and the CDC, are being undermined. Until recently, that parts of the administration were calling into question whether people should follow basic best practices like wearing masks.”
Even staff writers at The Atlantic have pointed out some of the CDC’s issues with proper reporting amidst the recent pandemic, summarizing that:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conflating the results of two different types of coronavirus tests, distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic.
Some of these “top scientists” in general, which Facebook, like other Big Tech companies, has set up to be the gold standard of truth about the COVID-19 virus and its prevention, have proven to be extremely problematic since the pandemic began.
Facebook VP of Integrity Guy Rosen wrote an April 16 company blog informing Facebook users that “We’re going to start showing messages in News Feed to people who have liked, reacted or commented on harmful misinformation about COVID-19 that we have since removed.” Rosen specifically noted that “These messages will connect people to COVID-19 myths debunked by the WHO including ones we’ve removed from our platform for leading to imminent physical harm.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) itself spread misinformation from China early on. In mid-January, the WHO reported faulty information that would worsen the COVID-19 pandemic’s spread across the globe the WHO claimed in a tweet:
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.
Whether Facebook will distance itself from problematic experts in the pursuit of actual truth about the pandemic remains to be seen. Facebook’s official Twitter account announced July 15, the same day as the interview, that it will be “launching Facts About Covid-19, a section in the Covid Information Center that will debunk common myths about the pandemic” in order to “further limit the spread of misinformation.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Facebook headquarters at 1-650-308-7300 or 1-650-543-4800 and demand that the platform provide equal footing for conservatives,. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable
