Twitters pretty bad too.

Fairly sure by this point that anyone with more than a couple of numbers in their account name should be banned.

What gets me about all of the social media companies is that insane, dangerous crap is given the same weight as talking about the weather.

And like having a soapbox with a few standing around already, it never takes much to draw in a crowd.

It also should have rules about adding titles to names someone spouting off on one whilst being a "Dr" shouldn't be allowed (same goes for professor etc) and even then only if their specialism is openly declared (who wants to be given a lecture in how bad vaccines are by a homeopathic Dr? Or how 5G is controlling us by a Liberal arts professor?).

Hum, and who assess whats crap and what isn't? Us chattering apes chatter incessantly. Most of it is inane banal rubbish, some of it is interesting, some maybe misleading or dangerous. We always have and always will. All that is different here is the communication channel for the stream of chatter. Recently, we have moved to world wide chatter distribution system. Whether this warrants the sort of mud slinging and angst that is currently happening is debatable. I recon there could be money at stake ;)

Facebook is being attacked as a proxy for Republican anti-vax messages here. It's not the medium they're writing their lies on, its the people writing those lies. The lies are straight Republican propaganda.

At the core of it, you've got a political party playing politics with a deadly disease.

If they succeed, Biden's vaccine rollout is undermined, their voters die, their viewers die, their followers die, but those deaths help them get reelected, and they claim success: "Biden failed, look at all these people he [really we] killed needlessly".

That's the core problem here. Republican politics, not Facebook.

Look at Tucker Carlson, claiming vaccines don't work back in April. He's been vaccinated, like the rest of the Fox News Liars. He is clearly doing a run for President on an anti-vax message. a) Trying to interview the big boss Putin, b) posing for staged "working man" pictures in Time magazine. If Biden succeeds and Covid dies out as its R0 drops quickly below one, then what hope does Tucker have to be President? None! On the other hand if he can keep R0 above 1, keep the disease rolling, keep his viewers dying, pin their deaths on Biden, he keeps his opportunity open.

It's pure cynical politics nothing else.

There's no point in saying that only the Republicans are using it as a political playground.

ALL politicians and parties are using/abusing social media as their latest propaganda toy.

What's actually happening is that the government are trying to gain control over Social Media. Trump started to do it , Biden is continuing the same game but just waving a different flag.. The end goal is the same for both parties..

The government has become scared of what Social media is capable of controlling... and rightly so..

Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Brin are not politicians, and yet they now have more power in the fingertips than any politician ever had...

The government has become scared of what Social media is capable of controlling... and rightly so..

Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Brin are not politicians, and yet they now have more power in the fingertips than any politician ever had...

The basic question is Facebook now have a list of a dozen people spreading 2/3rds of the anti-vaxx rubbish on the Internet via their platforms, and their accounts still haven't been deleted yet. Why is that? There's no good reason for it.

It's not surprising that politicans want to control them. They should be controlled.

"Why is that? There's no good reason for it."

They make money from it and they don't care about anything else. They've already got insane amounts of money that's unspendable in a dozen lifetimes but, apparently, that's not enough for them and a few deaths here and there apparently don't matter as long as they continue to make money. The anti-vaxxers are also more profitable than normal people because they are more gullible and therefore susceptible to ads.

No, not all, it's Republicans.

It's the Republicans that are undermining the vaccine rollout, its Republicans that seek to gain by engineering Bidens failure.

Republicans.

"Needle Nazi's" for example, my comment title, was Lauren Boebert pretending that the vaccines are poison and vaccine rollout is akin to Nazi's gassing Jews. One of her most recent tweets: "Biden has deployed his Needle Nazis to Mesa County,.... Did I wake up in Communist China?" she said, trying for a double dog whistle there.

"Marjorie Taylor Greene" did it too, calling doctors giving vaccinations "Brown Shirts". One week after claiming the mask mandate in the House was akin to the holocaust: "You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany,"

Sure, she has to wear a mask, or be vaccinated, and its akin to Nazi Germany gassing jews according to her.

Tuckers run anti-vax scare stories, Sean Hannity has, Trump Jr has done it, Republicans.

Ron Johnson was kicked off YouTube for a week trying to push anti-vax lies.

It's not just lies abou the vaccine, they're passing bills that actively undermine the vaccine rollout. e.g. Ron DeSantis making it illegal to even ask if a person has been vaccinated, and making the issuing of vaccine certificates illegal.

He's even barred mask mandates.

So your care helper in your Florida old persons home, could be unvaccinated, maskless, infectiuous and kill you and DeSantis passed the law to enable that.... For a political meme.

Republicans.

When I read the above comments I understand only one thing, that the world has gone crazy..

What kind of lives do you lead that you feel that it is necessary to reduce everything to Republican or Democrat...

Do you actually wake up in the morning and bow down and pray to your Republican/Democrat overlords thanking them for the bread that you about to eat..

Stop reading the nonsense social media websites, your neighbors are actually nice people and you can collectively can make the world a better place.. You can't do it alone..

The current political division using either class, race, colour or whatever flavor of the day is creating the potential for a very serious situation in the near future.... It's looking damned bleak because you are following the rhetoric...

Politicians don't care about you, they just want the perks of their positions/jobs.. Any and all of them would change sides at the drop of a hat in order to remain in power. They know how to play you and by playing their game you are encouraging them to continue...

He's totally right. My Mom is on Facebook (noooo), and it's just awash in the anti-vax stuff. And Facebook, contrary to whatever they may say (they have always been lying a-holes), actively shows her and everyone else this crap because they know it increases engagement. I'm lucky I got her vaccinated months ago before she saw too much of this.

Yes, it's the dumbasses and cynical bastards on the left and right who are producing all the content, but Facebook is deliberately disseminating it because that helps them financially. Anything they claim to be doing to halt the spread is just covering their ass. They'd grind live kittens into blood meal if that were profitable. And spreading anti-vax information is profitable.

If 67% of Americans are vaccinated, how does Facebook's disseminating anti-vax bullshit increase their profits? Did all of the poor people get vaccinated?

I'm not entirely sure of what your questions mean, but encouraging divisive and controversial opinions helps Facebook financially by causing people to spend more time on Facebook. This means more ad impressions, which means more money. That's basically the business model.

"12 people who are producing 65 per cent of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms"

Can we get the names of these 12 please? And then could someone please place a large order for tar and feathers?

Actually better yet, this being America, can someone who has had a relative die from Corona, who specifically and publically refused to get vaccinated after reading the bollocks from these 12, please sue them into oblivion! Maybe then they'll disappear back into the holes they crawled out of...

(from someone who has known people who have died from Covid, and another since afflcited with long covid. It's not a joke people, get vaccinated now!)

Can we get the names of these 12 please? And then could someone please place a large order for tar and feathers?

Or simply charge them with some appropriate medical offence and prevent them from posting on "social" media? That would seem easier (and cheaper) than starting a legal battle with the media companies they use.

The problem is that these 12 people are specialized in getting attention (and money) from their bullshit and know exactly where the line is. So they toe the line to where what they are saying is very very very close to, but not actually illegal or legally actionable. They'll be able to claim: "What people take away from anything I say is their own problem". They'll always put weasel words in like: "but talk to your doctor about what's right for your health" (One sentence after a 5 minute diatribe over the evils of X or Y) and that basically absolves them from being legally responsible.

I call that Darwinism: if some are too stupid to believe some nuts theories, then Mother Nature found a way to clean the pool of their genes. If people refuse to gezt vaccinated and die, that's now their own problem, not the one of the collectivity.

Facebook's Vice President of Integrity

ROTFL. They like a good joke at Facebook. Sounds like "KKK's vice president of multicultural exchange", or "Spanish inquisition's vice president of ecumenism"

Unfortuately it is a problem for the collective.

Because those idiots end up in our collective hospitals taking up intensive care beds and causing our hospital staff to be overworked. That means they potentially make mistakes elsewhere and for other people who havent been stupid.

On top of that, you have things like insurance costs which are averaged over the whole community which because of their hospitalisation drives all of our prices up. Sick people dont work, production goes down, costs of goods go up for everyone .

And finally, there are people out there that cant be vaccinated, not out of some stupid belief, but because medically they're either allergic to something in the vaccine, or their immune systems are already damaged and cant withstand the vaccine. The idiots not getting vaccinated, puts these peoples very lives at risk, and that again harms the entire community.

So whilst its nice to think that idiots not getting vaccinated is just hurting themselves, the truth is, it risks other peoples lives, directly and indirectly, and drives prices up for EVERYONE in the community. For that reason, these people need to be educated, to realise how stupid they're being, and how much they are costing their communities...

If people refuse to gezt vaccinated and die, that's now their own problem, not the one of the collectivity.

This is one of the misconceptions about vaccination. It isn't just there to reduce the severity to you of a virus that you catch, its primary purpose is to reduce the spread of the virus within the community you inhabit. If we want this virus to drop to levels where we can largely ignore it everyone needs to be immunized, either via vaccination or by catching it & recovering. Since catching it has some chance of being fatal, vaccination is the more practical route.

In short, vaccination isn't to protect you , it's to protect us all .

Just to add a small addendum to your comment Phil, catching and recovering does not always provide long term immunity from said virus. And the evidence is mounting that the immunity from catching and recovering from Covid is maybe 6 months at most. Vaccines however, can be tailored to provide that long last immunity.

A perfect example is Tetanus. Which catching and recovering from provides pretty much no natural immunity. However, the Tetanus vaccine does provide a long lasting immunity (although you still need a booster shot every 10 years).

Vaccination is the only good way to get the virus to drop in the community, not to mention avoiding the potential side effects of getting infected (e.g. long covid, and internal organ damage).

It's also important because it reduces the opportunity and risk of the virus mutating into more infection variants which are not controlled by the current vaccines.

Consume it at your own risk.

Best avoided.

I think that is a good one line summary of the current problem.

Don't want to be vaccinated? Absolutely. Keep wearing you MAGA hat as a warning to others, and best don't rely on socialist Obamacare either when the entirely avoidable but inevitable happens - just keep away from sane people. Might want to use that gun to shoot yourself if it gets too bad.

Oh, and don't go to work in any profession that requires you to interface with many people. Teaching, medical care, homes for the elderly, shops, office - not the right place for you to be. Stay on your farm.

Get swine flu instead.