Facebook versus the BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
www.bmj.com
The BMJ has locked horns with Facebook and the gatekeepers of international fact checking after one of its investigations was wrongly labelled with “missing context” and censored on the world’s largest social network. Rebecca Coombes and Madlen Davies report On 3 November Howard Kaplan, a retired dentist from Israel, posted a link to a BMJ investigation article in a private Facebook group.1 The investigation reported poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia, a contract research company helping to carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial.2 The article brought in record traffic to bmj.com and was widely shared on Twitter, helping it achieve the second highest “Altmetric” score of all time across all biomedical publications.3 But a week after his posting Kaplan woke up to a message from Facebook (fig 1). Fig 1 Clockwise from top left: Facebook’s “missing context” notice; administrators of a private group were warned of a “partly false” post; Facebook’s warning on Howard Kaplan’s original post; Cochrane’s tweet after being “shadowbanned” by Instagram “The Facebook Thought Police has issued me a dire warning,” he wrote in a new post. “Facebook’s ‘independent fact-checker’ doesn’t like the wording of the article by the BMJ. And if I don’t delete my post, they are threatening to make my posts less visible. Obviously, I will not delete my post . . . If it seems like I’ve disappeared for a while, you’ll know why.”4 Kaplan was not the only Facebook user having problems. Soon, several BMJ readers were alerting the journal to Facebook’s censorship. Over the past two months the journal’s editorial staff have been navigating the opaque appeals process without success, and still today their investigation remains obscured on Facebook. The experience has highlighted serious concerns about the “fact checking” being undertaken by third party …
  • Not_irony [he/him]
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    3 years ago

    I skipped to the end so you dont have to:

    Kamran Abbasi, The BMJ’s editor in chief, said, “We should all be very worried that Facebook, a multibillion dollar company, is effectively censoring fully fact checked journalism that is raising legitimate concerns about the conduct of clinical trials. Facebook’s actions won’t stop The BMJ doing what is right, but the real question is: why is Facebook acting in this way? What is driving its world view? Is it ideology? Is it commercial interests? Is it incompetence? Users should be worried that, despite presenting itself as a neutral social media platform, Facebook is trying to control how people think under the guise of ‘fact checking.’”

    :curious-marx:

    • bombshell [none/use name]
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      3 years ago

      They specifically say elsewhere in the article that chuds are quoting and reposting their articles. Has nothing to do with truth or not - it's just keeping the chuds smacked down and the BMJ is being sent a message about complying with the dominant narrative or else.

  • TankieTanuki [he/him]
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    3 years ago

    A supposedly objective “fact check” in reality was “subject to individual reviewer opinion,”

    :shocked-pikachu:

    It seems sometimes automation and artificial intelligence get it wrong.

    Love 2 be given Pinocchios by an algorithm. :pinocchio-evil:

    On 20 December Lead Stories [the fact checking company] also sent a series of inflammatory tweets after publishing its response to The BMJ’s open letter. It said,

    “Hey @bmj_latest, when your articles are literally being republished by a website run by someone in the ‘Disinformation Dozen’ perhaps you should be reviewing your editorial policies instead of writing open letters.”

    Omg what snarky, arrogant assholes. Telling scientists how to do their job.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
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    3 years ago

    Privatizing all communications infrastructure and platforms was a good idea.