Facebook's Biden drama: misinformation has hurt the social giant's rep — but not its biz

Drama in the feed... This month, President Biden said social platforms like Meta are "killing people" with Covid misinformation. Facebook's response: a blog post called "Moving Past Finger Pointing." In short, Facebook says it's not its fault that Biden failed to get 70% of American adults vaccinated by July 4th. Biden walked back his comments, but said social platforms should do more to tackle misinfo. As the Delta variant spreads, Covid cases have been surging among the unvaccinated.

• Biden believes anti-vax content is a key reason some remain unvaxed. A recent study found that 95% of Covid misinfo reported across social platforms wasn't removed.
• Facebook says it has removed 18M instances of Covid misinfo, and that 85% of its US users have been, or want to be, vaccinated.

Déjà vu vibes... This public spat is part of a much broader issue of content moderation on Facebook, spanning from election interference, to hate speech, to the Capitol riots. Last year, 1K+ advertisers, including big shots like Verizon, paused spending on FB ads to protest its moderation policies. That didn't make a dent in FB's sales. Despite the criticism, FB's biz is thriving, and its stock is at a record high:

• For the quarter ended in March, FB's ad sales soared 48% from last year to $25B, and profit nearly doubled to $9.5B.
• When FB reports this Wednesday, analysts expect $28B in quarterly sales, or 60% growth from last year — even faster than the previous quarter.