Mark Zuckerberg said that the establishment was wrong to censor skepticism during the coronavirus pandemic that ended up being either true or debatable.
Zuckerberg, who is the CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, made the comments during an interview on the “Lex Fridman Podcast” while explaining the difficulties of identifying misinformation on social media.
“So misinformation, I think, has been a really tricky one because there are things that are obviously false, right, or they may be factual but may not be harmful. So are you gonna censor someone for just being wrong? If there’s no kind of harm implication of what they’re doing? There’s a bunch of real issues and challenges there,” said Zuckerberg.
“Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions,” he continued.
“Unfortunately, I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true. And that stuff is really tough, right?” he added.
“It really undermines trust,” Zuckerberg concluded.
Zuckerberg has been criticized by many on the right, most notably for censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story just ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
In an interview with Joe Rogan in August, Zuckerberg said that Facebook censored the story on the basis that the FBI had previously warned about the possibility of Russian disinformation being released in order to damage the Biden presidential campaign.
“We just kind of thought, hey look, if the FBI, which I still view is a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement, they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously,” he explained at the time.
Zuckerberg said that they restricted the reach of the story after believing it fit the guidelines of Russian disinformation issued by the FBI. He said he didn’t remember whether the FBI specifically singled out the Hunter Biden laptop story as disinformation.
Here’s more about Facebook censorship:
Facebook ADMITS its ‘fact-checkers’ are OPINION BASEDwww.youtube.com
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