Mr. Zuckerberg,
You have said that "Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth". I wholeheartedly agree. But after considerable pressure from advertisers, Facebook has finally capitulated and blocked one of Trump's posts about Covid. The post contained a video which included Trump saying that children are "almost immune from this disease."
Facebook justified the removal, saying "this video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from
COVID-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID
misinformation"
Of course "immune" and "almost immune" are not the same. In the absence of an obvious definition of "almost immune", let's just examine if the President's statement is reasonable from a common sense perspective.
As of July 11 in the US, 20 kids aged 5-14 and 6838 people aged 45-54 have died of Covid. The populations of these groups are about the same. This means school age kids have a 99.7% lower mortality from Covid than the older group. Or we can turn it around and say the older group's mortality from Covid is 34,090% higher. It may be hard to say if Trump's imprecise statement is false, but it is certainly not misleading.
The President does not seem fazed by his posts being censored. It just gains him more free exposure. I worry more about others such as myself, who attempt to expose ways in which our conventional wisdom has lost its way. We are dependent on social media companies, which operate as monopolies. Corporate censorship of alternative views is as clear a threat to our civil liberties as a state controlled media.
One way or another, this will not end well.
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