What Facebook Can’t Fix

When people lose faith in institutions, they gravitate to misinformation. It’s time to address the trust vacuum.

The following is a selection from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz. To get it in your inbox each week, you can sign up here.

This week, I tried to hold two stories in my head at once. The first was President Biden’s remark that Facebook was “killing people” by allowing vaccine misinformation to spread. The second was the newly revealed detail that Curtis Wright, the FDA director who oversaw the agency’s approval of OxyContin, went on to work for the opioid’s manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, for an annual salary of approximately $400,000.

The two stories together remind that misinformation propagates online for two reasons, yet one is regularly overlooked. The first and most obvious is that social media, its algorithms, and its content moderation policies provide an ideal environment for false information to spread. The second is that these lies take hold when the public loses faith in the institutions meant to keep it safe. When FDA directors are paid off after approving a drug that contributes to the deaths of thousands, people will become susceptible to false claims that the vaccines it authorizes are harmful too. Facebook’s algorithms might mitigate…