illustrate how Meta’s tolerance for anti-vaccine content and health misinformation far predated the first cases of Covid-19 in the US. The document shows researchers at the company were well aware of the levels of medical misinformation surfacing in user’s feeds in the early days of the pandemic and understood the platform could play a role in “severely impacting public health attitudes.
“Social media is a lifeline for patients, literally. Long covid patients have died of organ failure, infections, cardiac events and more, and social media is one place they can share information,” World Health Network Outreach Director Julia Doubleday said. “Cutting off communication between suffering and disabled patients is cruel in the extreme. It’s indefensible.”