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That sense of outrage easily sustained conservative media throughout the weekend, with both pundits and Republican lawmakers weighing in on, as Ted Cruz put it, “their willingness to trample on free speech, to trample on the Constitution, to use government power to silence you, everything we feared they might do.” And it really is censorship,” Missouri senator Josh Hawley said Thursday on-where else?-Fox News. “I just think that this kind of coordination between big government and the big monopoly corporation, boy, that is scary stuff. Not only does it draw attention away from the network’s own culpability for the vaccination gap, but it feeds a potent right-wing narrative about government and Big Tech colluding to silence conservatives. The Biden administration’s criticism of Facebook is a double win for Fox News. He has said on-air that college students “shouldn’t get the shot,” and he recently referred to a Biden administration proposal to send people door-to-door to encourage vaccination as “the greatest scandal in my lifetime, by far.”
Tucker Carlson, the host of the most popular show on cable news, with nearly 3 million nightly viewers, regularly brings vaccine skeptics on the air. Instead, the dominant message is one of distrust. But that sort of messaging from conservative elites is rare. One recent experiment found that showing a clip of Donald Trump praising Covid vaccines made self-identified Republicans more likely to say they intend to get vaccinated. What changed was signaling from powerful conservatives. This was hardly inevitable before the pandemic, vaccine skepticism was a fringe phenomenon that didn’t skew along party lines. As of early July, the average vaccination rate was nearly 12 percentage points higher in counties that voted for Biden than in counties that voted for Trump. Vaccine hesitancy in the US is heavily partisan. And yet Murthy aimed his criticism not at Fox, but at social media.
He was appearing on a network that encourages viewers to fear and distrust the vaccines every morning and night. The surgeon general was warning about how misinformation leads to vaccine hesitancy and, thus, preventable Covid deaths. It isn’t what Murthy said there that matters-it’s where he said it. If there’s one sentence encapsulating how dysfunctional the whole debate is, it’s this, from a Sunday Wall Street Journal article: “‘The reality is that misinformation is still spreading like wildfire in our country, aided and abetted by technology platforms,’ Dr. (On Monday, Biden said he had been referring to vaccine deniers, not Facebook, when he made the “killing” comment.) Finally, on Friday, Biden was asked by a reporter what his message to platforms like Facebook was, and he replied, “They’re killing people.” The company responded testily, accusing the White House of scapegoating it and insisting that it has saved lives by displaying accurate Covid information. Then, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki chastised Facebook for not banning users who violate its policies on vaccine content. On Thursday, US surgeon general Vivek Murthy released an advisory about health misinformation that included some fairly banal observations about how fake news spreads on social media. The White House and Facebook got into a feud over the past few days after President Biden and aides repeatedly accused the company of doing too little to combat Covid vaccine misinformation.
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