Meta’s new CTO says we’re to blame for misinformation, not Facebook

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Meta, the new name for Facebook’s parent company, is bringing on a new CTO next year. That new executive, Andrew Bosworth, recently sat down to do an interview with Axios on HBO, where he said that the platform isn’t to blame for the spread of misinformation.

Bosworth is currently the VP of augmented and virtual reality, but he will be stepping into the role of chief technical officer next year. In his interview on Sunday, Bosworth says that it is “individual humans” who are responsible for whatever information is spread on Facebook.

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“Individual humans are the ones who choose to believe or not believe a thing. They are the ones who choose to share or not share a thing,” he says in the interview.

Facebook has been under fire over the amount of misinformation that is spread on the platform. President Biden said that Facebook’s misinformation is killing people, and the recent “Facebook Papers” shed some light on the type of content that Facebook promotes.

Despite these revelations, Bosworth feels that the users on the platform are responsible for what they believe on the platform and not Facebook itself. Of individuals listening to that misinformation, Bosworth says, “That’s their choice. They are allowed to do that. You have an issue with those people. You don’t have an issue with Facebook.”

“If we took every single dollar and human that we had, it wouldn’t eliminate people seeing speech that they didn’t like on the platform,” says Bosworth.

With Bosworth taking the role as Meta’s CTO, it will be interesting to see what direction Facebook heads when it comes to combatting misinformation on the platform.

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