I have an interest in the distribution of misinformation particularly as it relates to political issues. I write frequently about political issues on Facebook and recently I ran afoul of Facebook’s concern for misinformation.
AS you can see, I contested this decision and some have told me my post is not visible. Here is the post.
At first, I thought it was because of the source I cited. Esquire is not necessarily what I regard as a source for political reporting and this actual article raised the concern that Jared Kushner bought into a company in a position to benefit from the decision to rely on U.S. medical resource providers. When I searched for an article, I was reacting to news that the U.S. could have been much faster had it taken advantage of WHO resources. I now think it was what I wrote rather than the article I cited. Facebook would have had to include an assessment of the content within the cited article to decide it was spam.
My position was not something I fabricated out of thin air. For example, this piece from Politico makes very much the same argument. I listened as experts on television programs made this same point as well as VP Biden in last night’s debate.
[The Trump administration has come under criticism for the test-kit shortage, which local public health officials have said hampers their ability to survey the U.S. population for the virus. San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed called the shortage of kits “a national disgrace” in a letter to Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday.
While Trump tried to pin blame on Obama, the initial responsibility for the shortage appears to lie with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rather than adopt a test used overseas and recommended by the World Health Organization, the CDC chose to develop and distribute its own, according to reporting by ProPublica. That test didn’t work, forcing a scramble by the Trump administration for alternatives.]
Ezra Klein suggests that acceptance of flawed of misinformation can be higher among those who know more about a topic. I assume this happens because the more information have the more you have to work with in “interpreting” what tends to be ambiguous information.
Further investigation does show the issue with the WHO and COVID testing is more complicated than we wanted to do it ourselves even if this takes longer. Here is the analysis from Snopes. Here is the analysis of the Biden claim. There is far more in these analyses that influence my final position.
So, the WHO supplies kits to impoverished countries and expects countries with their help to produce their own kits. The U.S. was slow to respond and the first test kits developed were flawed resulting, in further delays. No, Obama policies were not responsible for the delay.
One final thing. After all this, I see Facebook says it is having problems. Zuckerberg had this motto “move fast and break things”. This is not the time for this logic.
