On the 3rd of November of 2021, Howard Kaplan, a retired Israeli dentist, posted a link to a BMJ research article in a private Facebook chat. The article reported bad practices on clinical trials taking place at Ventavia, a research company contracted to carry out pivotal tests on the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.
However, a week after the sharing by Kaplan, he received a message from Facebook which he ended up revealing on the same social network.
“The Facebook Thought Police gave me a terrible warning. Facebook’s independent fact-checker didn’t like the content of the BMJ article and if I don’t delete my post, they threaten to make my posts less visible. Obviously I’m not going to delete the post… So if it looks like I´ve disappeared for a while, you already know why.”
However, Howard Kaplan wasn’t the only BMJ user and reader to have problems with Facebook. Several people started reporting a variety of problems when they tried to share investigations on the social network, being redirected to a “fact check” carried out by Lead Stories, one of ten companies in the US hired by Facebook, which aims to “unmask fake news”.
In a Lead Stories article citing a Pfizer spokesperson, the company said it had reviewed the concerns of BMJ whistleblower Brook Jackson and had taken “actions to correct and remediate” where necessary. However, with regard to the company’s investigation, “they didn’t identify any issues or concerns that jeopardized the integrity of the study”.
The BMJ then contacted Lead Stories asking to remove the article, but this request was rejected.
“In the Facebook system, we flagged the article with ‘absent context’, which is the lowest possible flagging category”, started by saying Dean Miller, the author of the article by Lead Stories. “We didn’t question the integrity of the BMJ story, just the scope of it”, he concluded.
Given this reply, the BMJ decided to contact Pfizer, Ventavia and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Pfizer said it had conducted an investigation into Ventavia in 2020 to “correct and remediate what was necessary”, Ventavia did not respond and the FDA said it didn’t had the capacity to respond as “it is a ongoing matter”.
So, in December, the BMJ wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s Chief Executive. In the letter, editors Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi called Lead Stories fact-checking “innacurate, incompetent and irresponsible”.
Zuckerberg did not reply but Lead Stories did, saying that Brook Jackson was not a laboratory scientist and that she had no qualifications. The BMJ was quick to respond, as was Jackson.
“Jackson has over 15 years of experience in clinical research coordination and her previous position was director of operations,” the BMJ began by saying. “I never claimed to be a scientist. Also, even an inexperienced person would have seen what was going wrong in Ventavia, it didn’t take an expert,” Jackson said.
Therefore, the BMJ plans to appeal to the Facebook Content Oversight Board, an independent 20-person panel that has the power to decide whether or not Facebook should remove specific content. For those not familiar with it, it was this group that prevented Donald Trump, former US president, from publishing again on both Facebook and Instagram after the incident in the Capitol.
To this day, BMJ readers still have trouble sharing the newspaper’s articles and the editor-in-chief left a message.
“We should all be very concerned that Facebook, a billion-dollar company, is censoring fully verified journalism that raises concerns about the conduct of clinical trials. Facebook is trying to control the way people think under the guise of fact checking”.
Source: BMJ “Facebook versus the BMJ: when fact-checking goes wrong”
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