Facebook suspended Monday the account of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who spread misinformation about coronavirus. This came a day after Twitter permanently banned one her accounts for posting similar messages.
Ms. Greene, a Georgia Republican, had posted falsely about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” She published the message on Saturday as part a long post on American life “Before Covid” and “After Covid,” calling public health measures meant to stem the spread of the coronavirus into question, including testing, mask-wearing and vaccine mandates.
On Monday morning, on the alternative social messaging platform Telegram, Ms. Greene posted a screenshot of a Facebook notice that said, “You can’t post or comment for 24 hours,” and cited a violation of Facebook’s community standards.
“A post violated our policies and we have removed it, but removing her account for this violation is beyond the scope of our policies,” Aaron Simpson, a Facebook spokesman, said in a statement.
As coronavirus spreads, the social network has changed its content policies in recent years. It announced in December 2020 that it would take down posts with claims that have been proven false by the World Health Organization (WHO) or government agencies.
Facebook suspended Ms. Greene’s personal Facebook account, where she had published the message about vaccines. Her verified government account was still active by the company. Twitter, which said it had banned Ms. Greene’s personal account after she had a fifth “strike,” also left her government account active.
Ms. Greene’s post cited misleading information from a government database of unverified raw data called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a decades-old system that relies on self-reported cases from patients and health care providers.
There is no evidence of widespread major side effects from the coronavirus vaccines apart from a rare blood clotting disorder linked to Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, according to guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month. The disorder has been linked to at least nine deaths in the United States in the last year. Therefore, the agency recommends that other approved vaccines be used instead.
The VAERS database, which is administered by the Food and Drug Administration and C.D.C. has been cited in numerous coronavirus falsifiables to support the notion that side effects from coronavirus vaccinations have been underreported. An overview of the VAERS database on the F.D.A.’s website said that VAERS reports “generally cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness.”
Source: NY Times
