Facebook exec says ‘people,’ not platform, to blame for vaccine misinformation

Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth said in an interview aired Sunday  that the burden of misinformation spreading on the social media platform fell on individual users. 

“I think that Facebook ran probably the biggest COVID vaccine campaign in the world,” Bosworth told “Axios on HBO” when asked if he thought vaccine hesitancy would be the same with or without social media.

“What more can you do if some people who are going to get that real information from a real source choose not to get it?” he said. 

“That’s their choice. They’re allowed to do that,” he added. “You have an issue with those people. You don’t have an issue with Facebook. You can’t put that on me.”

Bosworth is set to become chief technical officer for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, next year. He has been involved in the company’s work around augmented and virtual reality. 

President Biden said in July that social media platforms were “killing people” due to vaccine misinformation. “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people,” Biden said.

He softened his criticism days later, pointing the blame at the most prolific spreaders of vaccine misinformation. 

“Facebook isn’t killing people, these 12 people are out there giving misinformation. Anyone listening to it is getting hurt by it. It’s killing people. It’s bad information,” he said. 

Bosworth told Axios it was undemocratic for a social platform to attempt to control people’s speech, even in cases when it might be harmful. 

“I don’t believe that the answer is ‘I will deny these people the information they seek, and I will enforce my will upon them.’ That can’t be the right answer. That cannot be the democratic answer,” Bosworth said, noting “the onus is and should be, in any meaningful democracy, on the individual.”

Last month, a poll indicated that roughly 3 in 4 Americans said Facebook was making society worse. However, those respondents were still divided on where they placed the blame.

Overall, 55 percent of people said they blamed the way “some people use Facebook” and 45 percent said they blamed “the way Facebook itself is run.”