British Medical Journal
Case #
3123

Facebook slaps "Fact Check" and "Missing Context" labels on British Medical Journal's exposé on Pfizer: The British Medical Journal published an eye-opening report Nov. 2 alleging the following: "Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial." Facebook fact-checker Lead Stories attempted to throw cold water on the report in a write-up of the BMJ's report headlined: "Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials." As a result, users are now confronted with "Fact Check" and "Missing Context" labels when they try to post the BMJ report to their newsfeeds. BMJ responded to Lead Stories' write-up in an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook says in one of its labels on the BMJ report that "[p]ages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will see their overall distribution reduced and be restricted in other ways." The BMJ slammed Lead Stories' fact check as "inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible." It continued: "It fails to provide any assertions of fact that The BMJ article got wrong." BMJ requested the "immediate removal of the 'fact checking' label and any link to the Lead Stories article, thereby allowing our readers to freely share the article on [Facebook's] platform." According to Facebook, users fail to click through a fact-check interstitial to see the post 95% of the time

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