Rep. David McKinley, R-W.Va., charged Wednesday that Facebook is making the nation’s opioid addiction worse in the U.S. by allowing online pharmacies to sell drugs illegally on the social media site.
At a House committee hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “of course” it should be illegal for online pharmacies to sell opioids without a prescription. But McKinley said it happens all the time on Facebook.
“Opioids are still available on your site … without a prescription on your site,” McKinley said. “It contradicts what you just said just a minute ago.”
“Your platform is still being used to circumvent the law, and allow people to buy highly addictive drugs without a prescription,” he added. “With all due respect, Facebook is actually enabling an illegal activity, and in so doing, you are hurting people.”
Zuckerberg replied that Facebook needs to do a “better job” policing the content that goes up on the social media site. But McKinley said as of now, Zuckerberg isn’t fulfilling the promise he made to take these sites down.
“You said you before you were going to take down those ads, but you didn’t do it,” he said. “When are you going to take down these posts done with illegal digital pharmacies?”
Zuckerberg explained that objectionable posts are removed once they are flagged, but admitted it’s not always easy to police all of the content that goes up.
“I agree this is a terrible issue, and respectfully, when there are tens of billions or 100 billion pieces of content that are shared every day, even 20,000 people reviewing it can’t look at everything,” he said. “What we need to do is build more AI tools that can proactively find that content.”
