Facebook has defended itself against U.S. President Joe Biden's assertion that the social media platform is 'killing people' by allowing misinformation about coronavirus vaccines to proliferate.
'The data shows that 85% of Facebook users in the US have been or want to be vaccinated against COVID-19,' Facebook claimed in a lengthy corporate blog post by Guy Rosen, a company vice president.
'President Biden's goal was for 70% of Americans to be vaccinated by July 4. Facebook is not the reason this goal was missed.'
'At a time when COVID-19 cases are rising in America, the Biden administration has chosen to blame a handful of American social media companies. While social media plays an important role in society, it is clear that we need a whole of society approach to end this pandemic. And facts — not allegations — should help inform that effort.
'The fact is that vaccine acceptance among Facebook users in the US has increased. These and other facts tell a very different story to the one promoted by the administration in recent days,' Facebook wrote in a defensive posting.
Still, a source from the Biden administration said Saturday that Biden publicly lambasted the platform after the White House has been asking for 'months' for help fighting what it called disinformation, according to Fox News.
Despite its puffed-up statements, Facebook hasn't done enough to stamp out untruths, the administration official said, according to Fox.
'They've been withholding information on what the rules are, what they have put in place to prevent dangerous misinformation from spreading [and] how they measure whether it's working,' the officials said.
The disagreement has bubbled over after the Indian Delta variant has ripped across the world - and now is showing up in U.S. data, as cases rise in many places, even as polls show, many of the unvaccinated believe the negative information that's circulating about the shots - information the White House says is false.
Zuckerberg V Biden: Facebook has hit back at President Biden after he accused the company of 'killing people' by allowing misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine to circulate on its platform
Facebook has defended itself against U.S. President Joe Biden's assertion that the social media platform is 'killing people' by allowing misinformation about coronavirus vaccines to proliferate, saying the facts tell a different story
'For people in the US on Facebook, vaccine hesitancy has declined by 50%; and they are becoming more accepting of vaccines every day.
'Since January, vaccine acceptance on the part of Facebook users in the US has increased by 10-15 percentage points (70% → 80-85%) and racial and ethnic disparities in acceptance have shrunk considerably.
Saturday evening's statement by Facebook was written by Guy Rosen, Vice-President of Integrity at the social media platform
'Increased vaccine acceptance has been seen on and off Facebook, with many leaders throughout the US working to make that happen,' the posting continued. 'We employed similar tactics in the UK and Canada, which have similar rates of Facebook usage to the US, and those countries have achieved more than 70% vaccination of eligible populations. This all suggests there's more than Facebook to the outcome in the US.
'Since the beginning of the pandemic we have removed over 18 million instances of COVID-19 misinformation,' Facebook explained.
'We have also labeled and reduced the visibility of more than 167 million pieces of COVID-19 content debunked by our network of fact-checking partners so fewer people see it and — when they do — they have the full context.'
Tension between the social media platform at the Administration had been brewing.
On Friday, a Facebook official said similar to NBC: 'In private exchanges the Surgeon General [Vivek Murthy] has praised our work, including our efforts to inform people about COVID-19... The White House is looking for scapegoats for missing their vaccine goals.'
The Biden Administration hoped to have 70 percent of American adults partially vaccinated against COVID by Independence Day - a goal they missed by three percent.
The Commander-in-Chief has voiced his frustration about vaccine misinformation proliferating on social media, saying it is stopping millions of Americans from getting the jab.
Earlier this week, the White House confirmed it had stepped up COVID-19 misinformation tracking as it tried to tackle slowing rates of vaccination.
Press Secretary Jen Psaki explicitly singled out Facebook saying that influential anti-vaxxers 'remain active' on the site 'despite some even being banned on other platforms'.
'You shouldn't be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation,' she stated on Thursday.
The following day, President Biden was asked if he had a message for Facebook, to which he responded: 'They're killing people. I mean it really. Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people.'
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