Facebook (Meta) virtual reality boss, who will soon be the company’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth said that people are responsible for “misinformation,” not social media platforms.
Online platforms are constantly criticized for spreading misinformation and hate by those who call for more online censorship.
“If we took every single dollar and human that we had, it wouldn’t eliminate people seeing speech that they didn’t like on the platform. It wouldn’t eliminate every opportunity that somebody had to use the platform maliciously,” Bosworth said in an interview with Axios.
“Individual humans are the ones who choose to believe or not believe a thing. They are the ones who choose to share or not share a thing,” Bosworth continued.
He contradicted the anti-free speech stance of his company by saying: “I don’t feel comfortable at all saying they don’t have a voice because I don’t like what they said.”
Bosworth added: “If your democracy can’t tolerate the speech of people, I’m not sure what kind of democracy it is. [Facebook is] a fundamentally democratic technology.”
The statement is particularly jarring considering the constant censorship of thought the platform engages in, under the guise of censoring “misinformation.”
Could it be that, after caving to the demands of the legacy media and voices of the Democratic party, Facebook may start to push back on some of the demands being made? It seems unlikely as only this week Facebook has been engaged in the same censorship of thought.
In recent times, Facebook has come under fire over its content moderation policy and has faced calls for more regulation of speech.
