Report: Facebook Is Censoring COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy
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All on Tue Jun 1 04:39:56 2021
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Facebook is suppressing comments and posts expressing doubts about the
COVID-19 vaccine to “drastically reduce user exposure to vaccine
hesitancy,” a new report states.
“Reducing the visibility of these comments represents another
significant opportunity for us to remove barriers to vaccination that
users on the platform may potentially encounter,” the Facebook
documents say.
Project Veritas first reported the censorship after two whistleblowers
shared leaked documents demonstrating how the Big Tech company is
testing algorithms to limit the spread of vaccine skepticism. The
internal memos examined by Project Veritas revealed that the algorithm currently affects 1.5 percent of users who question the immunization on
health authority pages.
The hesitancy comments are divided into multiple tiers with labels such
as “Indirect Vaccine Discouragement,” “Alarmism & Criticism,” and
“Borderline Vaccine (BV) Framework” and matched with certain levels of censorship carried out by Facebook. Any comments that do not explicitly
violate Facebook’s community standards, which were recently changed to
allow discussion about the possibility of a virus leak from the Wuhan
lab, are “tiered [sic] by potential harm and how much context is
required in order to evaluate harm.”
“Based on that VH score, we will demote or leave the comment alone
depending on the content within the comment,” one of the whistleblowers
told Project Veritas.
Facebook told the New York Post that it “proactively announced this
policy on our company blog and also updated our help center with this information,” referring to a new policy implemented in March that “add
[ed] a label on posts that discuss the safety of COVID-19 vaccines that
notes COVID-19 vaccines go through tests for safety and effectiveness
before they’re approved.”
Facebook, however, did not like that one of the whistleblowers, Morgan
Kahmann, a data technician at the Big Tech company, raised alarms about
how the newest algorithm was being used to silence people. Kahmann
recently went public with his identity after Facebook removed him from
his office and suspended him.
“What happened was I was at work, and I got a message from my
supervisor, out of the blue, basically saying ‘go ahead and wrap up
your area and clean up your stuff, gather your personal belongings, and
meet me in a meeting room in the lobby of the building.’ They’re
basically going to have me meet with the investigative team and grill
me on this whole situation,” Kahmann said.
Before he was forced out of the company, Kahmann reportedly obtained
documents that confirmed Facebook’s suppression algorithm is live “and
being implemented globally across Facebook and Instagram platforms.”
: Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated
: from Baylor University where she majored in political science and
: minored in journalism.
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