Nandita Bose – Reuters Feb 20, 2021
The White House has been reaching out to social media companies including Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc’s Google about clamping down on COVID misinformation and getting their help to stop it from going viral, a senior administration official said.
President Joe Biden, who has raced to curb the pandemic since taking office, has made inoculating Americans one of his top priorities and called the move “a wartime effort.” But tackling public fear about taking the vaccine has emerged as a major impediment for the administration.
Since the onset of the pandemic, calls from lawmakers asking the companies to tackle the spread of COVID misinformation on their platforms have grown.
The White House’s direct engagement with the companies to mitigate the challenge has not been previously reported. Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain has previously said the administration will try to work with Silicon Valley on the issue.
“Disinformation that causes vaccine hesitancy is going to be a huge obstacle to getting everyone vaccinated and there are no larger players in that than the social media platforms,” said the source, who has direct knowledge of the White House’s efforts.
“We are talking to them … so they understand the importance of misinformation and disinformation and how they can get rid of it quickly.”
The Biden White House is especially trying to make sure such material “does not start trending on such platforms and become a broader movement,” the source said.
Anti-vaccine protesters at Dodger Stadium, LA, in early February. Click to enlarge
The source cited the example of the anti-vaccine protests at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles in early February, and said the White House wants to stop events like that from happening again.
The protest, organized on Facebook through a page that promotes debunked claims about the coronavirus pandemic, masks and immunization, briefly blocked public access to the stadium – one of the largest vaccination sites in the country, where health authorities are administering more than 8,000 vaccines a day.
The event illustrated the extent to which social media platforms have become a critical organizing tool for movements such as the anti-vaccine drive, that spread misinformation and disinformation.
A growing number of anti-vaccine activists, emboldened by their rising social media following, have helped the movement gain strength in the United States. A report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate in July 2020 found social media accounts held by anti-vaxxers have increased their following by at least 7·8 million people since 2019.
The companies have repeatedly vowed to get rid of such material on their platforms but gaps remain in their enforcement efforts.
On Thursday, Senator Richard Blumenthal criticized the platforms in a tweet for carrying ads that he said funds and promotes “dangerous conspiracy theories, COVID-19 disinformation and malign foreign propaganda.”
A Facebook spokeswoman said that the company has reached out to the White House to offer “any assistance we can provide” and has recently announced a new policy to remove COVID and vaccine misinformation along with pages, groups, and accounts that repeatedly spread such material.
A Twitter spokesman said the company is “in regular communication with the White House on a number of critical issues including COVID-19 misinformation.”
Alphabet Inc’s Google did not comment on engagement with the White House, instead pointing to a company blog on and how it stops misinformation.
The source said the companies “were receptive” as they engaged with the White House. “But it is too soon to say whether or not it translates into lessening the spread of misinformation.”
There will be more details on how the White House is engaging with the social media companies on this issue in the “next ten days or so”, the source added.
Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington, Editing by Chris Sanders and Nick Zieminski
Reuters; joo controlled fake news. Truthseeker is scraping the bottom of the scum pond.
The first paragraph is an outright lie. The White House (- Trump), deep state, and social media are ‘one’. The three-letter agencies have always run social media. All social media is acting in unison, even YouTube comments, and content are censored. Many, many YouTube creators are putting their on other platforms & are making the point, saying that they expect to be deplaformed any time soon.
The first paragraph is reminiscent of the fake news stories that the US gov/deep state needed to ‘request’ info on XYZ. This was a lie. The NSA gets everything before Facebook gets it. You send a tweet, it goes to the NSA & goes on your file & is graded on contents. Sure, the tweet might go live, but it can be removed by the NSA in seconds if it gets ranked so highly that a human sheeple gets to see it. If you get flagged persistently, you get banned or blocked.
They say you can’t kill an idea whose time has come. Tech giants can limit internet speech but they can’t kill our ideas and ideas were getting around long before the internet ever existed. Nor can censorship make people believe the opposite is true. As this vaccine is rolled out globally and more healthy people die from it, with fewer people seen on the streets, at work, in schools, shops etc, we will see for ourselves when the idea is proven, even if by then there is no internet at all. There will be no way to hide the depopulation, and it’s unlikely billions are simply going to walk to their deaths at the insistence of a few millions.
I think this article is here for us to examine, like in a court-room, not look to for information. For us, the mainstream is enemy territory and we have to scout it.
The main problem with government today is a total lack of trust by people not entrapped by their diversions, stupid professional games , porn etc. people that can see voter fraud determining elections, billionaires getting richer, hoaxes , scams , bribes and criminal coercion by government intent on aiding the perpetrators! Now they say “trust us we’re here to help you,” if their “facts “ were true they wouldn’t need draconian measures or public relations campaigns to sell them. Instead they rely on censorship and Soviet methods to enforce their will. The public’s rights be damned!
@ lewis jones — you are correct, sir. I believe this article is posted here for two reasons: one, for purposes of demonstration to show Truthseekers the kind of conditioning being spread by legacy media/propaganda outlets and, two, there are nuggets of actual information in there, in this case the social media and tech giants openly admitting they’re censoring people for an agenda. Big Tech has been playing a major role in this massive psy-op in shutting down the truth, dissenting information, and counter-arguments.
Unfortunately, social media isn’t going away as part of their business model has been to exploit psychological conditioning and get the weaker minded people addicted, but people can decide to boycott the worst of those companies and support censorship-free platforms. Of course, the money masters will eventually just make those newer platforms an “offer they can’t refuse” and buy them out to try to maintain control, but people can then move on to the next censorship-free platform…OR just come to grips with how ridiculous and creepy much of it is and break the habit.
To Umbra Bellator–yes, the mainstream can be useful when it reluctantly draws attention to an assertion it wishes to debunk, if not everyone had even heard of it.