By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
I have been on Facebook for over 13 years to appreciate it as a part of my life in the new millennium. It has allowed me to document snapshots of my life and share them like an open journal with my “friends,” keeping them “close” even if actual connections were previously obscured by distance and time.
We can say I am part of the 74 million or so Filipinos who are an absolute sucker for Mark Zuckerburg’s invention of this social media community.
As Facebook expands and improves on its services to become more than just one’s personal public album into primarily a powerful communication and marketing tool for business, there is a lot more technology invested into it than we stop to think about.
That is why Facebook has renamed its company to Meta, which conforms to Zuckerburg’s idea of metaverse as “the next evolution of social connection.” For most of us, it would be difficult to wrap our heads around all this going on from the makers and innovators of this staple app on the very gadgets we hold as constant companions. To make things simple, it involves a lot of bots and artificial intelligence or AI.
For this reason, though, I have come across various experiences from friends in the FB community that were, to say the least, unfortunate. I have had buddies whose FB accounts had been suspended for days to a month after using mere words, phrases or hashtags that were flagged presumably by autonomous programs used for content filtering.
But it was only this past weekend that I felt truly disturbed when a well-respected doctor whose blog, Relative Joy For You, I follow shared his disappointment with Facebook’s content filtering. Apparently, FB deleted a very informative article he shared from science.org, titled “In rare cases coronavirus vaccines may cause Long Covid-like symptoms” because it was flagged as “false information.”
Knowing Dr. Benjie Co as an infectious disease expert, he exerts effort in vetting any information he shares on his FB page. The article, which he called an “excellent read,” sheds light on the other side of the spectrum when it comes to vaccines – “the unknown world of adverse events,” as he called it.
Here’s a part of his blog that should open the eyes of FB administrators: “It is ironic for FB to call out this post as FALSE INFORMATION but refuses to flag in its own marketplace or posts of online sellers on fake and counterfeit medicines. It does not take a lot of AI to flag sales of prescription medicines. The law does not allow the sale of any prescription drug online. What more medicines or vaccines that have only Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) approval! FB administrators do not have to go far in looking for what can and what cannot be vetted by bots or whatever intelligence they have left.”
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