It's sad to read the Terms of Service and easily count Facebook PR scandals like rings in a tree-trunk. My "favorite" example is the years-long fights over breastfeeding photos on individual profiles and in parenting groups: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/facebook-policy-on-breastfeeding-photo...
When a policy gets so specific that it starts talking about times the "child is latched" my eyes just glaze over and I can only read it like "DEAR WOMAN, please remember your body is disgusting, you're disgusting for having it, and it must remain covered aside from these extremely-specific legally-mandated exceptions. With love, everyone at FB."
For the audience: please note that this word is a gendered slur :)
I mean, this may be close to the root problem. At this point, the political atmosphere in the US is charged enough that scientific facts have become a matter of political debate.
To me this argument sounds like "Sometimes life vests are faulty, therefore they provide a false sense of security, therefore we should get rid of all life vests and just hope people have good swimming skills".
> There are plenty of legitimate studies on those sides, fact checking them away would be lying.
If they are legitimate, why would a fact checker say otherwise?
Right now though it's Harvard and 163 other parties each hoping that their patented-sequence still-totally-unknown product will be the one the entire world rushes to purchase: https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-c...
I know your Harvard example was hypothetical, but for what it's worth here's Harvard's actual COV*D trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04436276?term=NCT0443...
It's listed under Janssen, but you can read about the relationship here: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/04/harvards-coro...
It's been entertaining to watch him gradually tightening the screws on speech over the years though, as if this kind of end result was ever in doubt. Outrage is stronger than principle, and the same thing can be seen on reddit at smaller scale (in the last decade reddit has banned, more or less in order - pedo-adjacent, hate, violence, harassment/doxing, gore and illegal commerce communities). I don't think there's any way for a social media giant to avoid these kinds of restrictions - communities will spring up around any kind of material, other people will find them and the news will write about them (with the amusing side effect that you'll get a Streisand effect if you don't shut it down due to the increased attention).
Facebook has it worse it seems - they're actively taking money from some of the groups they're restricting/fact-checking, which is all kinds of messy and filled with conflicts of interest. It seems the money is winning out, which is about what I'd expect. It'll be interesting to see how they resolve these issues in the coming years.