FACEBOOK, the 21st CENTURY MENACE —
Facebook versus the BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
Who fact checks the fact checkers? Dr John Campbell
Institute of Scientific Freedom
On 3 November Howard Kaplan, a retired dentist from Israel, posted a link to a BMJ investigation article in a private Facebook group.1 The investigation reported poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia, a contract research company helping to carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial.2
The article brought in record traffic to bmj.com and was widely shared on Twitter, helping it achieve the second highest “Altmetric” score of all time across all biomedical publications.3 But a week after his posting Kaplan woke up to a message from Facebook (fig 1).
Read and listen to the above links for the full story.