During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on antitrust law with the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that posts positioning hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus cure will be taken down.
“We do not want to become the arbiters of truth. I think that would be a bad position for us to be in and not what we should be doing,” Zuckerberg said. “But on specific claims, if someone is going to go out and say that hydroxychloroquine is proven to cure COVID, when in fact it has not been proven to cure COVID, and that that statement could lead people to take a drug that in some cases, some of the data suggests that it might be harmful to people, we think that we should take that down.”
Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner challenged Zuckerberg and suggested that this is a “legitimate matter for discussion” and patients and their doctors should be deciding whether hydroxychloroquine is the right medication:
“There still is a debate on whether it is effective on either on treating or preventing COVID-19 and I think this is a legitimate matter of discussion and it would be up to a patient and their doctor to determine whether hydroxychloroquine was the correct medication, you know, given the circumstances.”
But Zuckerberg insisted that Facebook would be making the final ruling, regardless of some doctors’ opinion on the matter, and that his company’s position is: “Stating that there is a proven cure for COVID when there is, in fact, none, might encourage someone to go take something that could have some adverse effect so we do take that down.”
Zuckerberg’s comments come less than two days after a viral press conference featuring several doctors supporting hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment option was censored by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
Dr. Simone Gold, a board-certified physician and attorney who was the lead organizer of the censored press conference, stated that “there are always opposing views in medicine” and that treatment options for coronavirus should be debated and spoken about, not censored and silenced.
