Facebook happily serves misinformation to its users because it drives engagement.
So the government asked Facebook to be more diligent in their moderation and remove (some) lies that lead to more people dying from a preventable disease, and FB complied of their own accord.
I’m not one to ever defend Facebook, but… good?
What is the issue here?
Good!
As much as we need to tackle people spreading BS, removing content on the whims of a Govt request is something we be very concerned about, even corporate pressure to remove content is concern.
Telling a company, “Hey, quit disseminating lies about life threatening stuff” is not a “whim”.
There’s a pretty big difference between asking a company to remove misinformation and ordering them to do so via court order or at the point of a gun. At the end of the day, Facebook agreed with the government that the content was harmful and/or broke their TOS.
