[s1artibartfast]

>A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook's parent company, said the ads comparing the US Covid-19 response to Nazi Germany, comparing vaccines to the Holocaust, and the ad suggesting the vaccine was poison went against Facebook's vaccine misinformation policies.

Seems terrifying to me that Facebook has such policies in the fist place.

I agree that a shirt comparing US Covid-19 response to Nazi Germany or Fauci to Josef Mengele is poor taste, but to call a T-shits misinformation is a stretch.

"I'm originally from America but I currently reside in 1941 Germany"

This isn't misinformation because it isn't information. It is political criticism and opinion.

[jjkaczor]

Well - maybe if ads in the linear feed were not treated like every other kind of "information" and actually did not allow "Likes, Comments & Shares", I could agree with you a little more.

[s1artibartfast]

Can you expand on how "Likes, Comments & Shares" changes disagreeable opinions to misinformation? Is it because individuals post actual misinformation in the comments?

[somehnacct3757]

Not OP, but the theory was interesting to me. Allowing the engagement verbs on content like this is how Facebook measures the quality of a piece of content (quality as in, will this make people spend more time on Facebook.) No verbs, no metadata for FB's algo to work with, no way to tell one piece of content from the next.

Facebook users are mistaking engagement counts and Facebook's profit motive as a trust signal. A Nazi comparison post is spliced in between photos of your cousin's kids and a weekend trip your college roommate went on. If this same procession were flashing past your eyes instead of being scrolled, it would look like a scene from A Clockwork Orange.

Second, let's say you already believe something false (false because vaccine mandates are not actually like Nazi Germany) and Facebook is optimized to find posts from people who believe the same false thing and show it to you in the pursuit of time-on-site; Facebook is doing matchmaking to reinforce beliefs that are false. This is the same goal as misinformation. So even if it isn't misinformation, it shares the same harmful outcome as misinformation.

It's interesting that Facebook openly labels this stuff misinformation because there is some truth to your claim. These were just garbage opinions until they came in contact with Facebook's business model. The chemical reaction turned them into something worse. Facebook themselves calls it misinformation but it could only have become that with Facebook's help. A nice own-goal scored by the company.