3 yıl önce

White House: Facebook, YouTube are to blame for anti-vax propaganda

The social media platforms had given assurance of crackdown against vaccine misinformation but fake content continues to go around.

AP

US President Joe Biden's administration wants social media platforms to do more to curb false claims about Covid-19 vaccines.

YouTube and Facebook are on the list of social media platforms that the White House thinks are responsible for an alarming spread of misinformation about COVID vaccines and are not doing enough to stop it, Reuters reported citing sources in the administration.

The criticism comes just a week after President Joe Biden called Facebook and other social media companies "killers" for failing to slow the spread of misinformation about vaccines. He has since softened his tone.

A senior administration official said one of the key problems is "inconsistent enforcement."

YouTube and Facebook get to decide what qualifies as misinformation on their platforms. But the results have left the White House unhappy.

"Facebook and YouTube... are the judge, the jury and the executioner when it comes to what is going on in their platforms," an administration official said, describing their approach to Covid misinformation.

"They get to grade their own homework."

Some of the main pieces of vaccine misinformation the Biden administration is fighting include that the Covid-19 vaccines are ineffective, false claims that they carry microchips and that they hurt women's fertility, the official said.

Social media companies have come under fire recently from Biden, his press secretary, Jen Psaki, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who have all said the spread of lies about vaccines is making it harder to fight the pandemic and save lives.

A recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which has also been highlighted by the White House, showed 12 anti-vaccine accounts are spreading nearly two-thirds of anti-vaccine misinformation online. Six of those accounts are still posting on YouTube.

"We would like to see more done by everybody" to limit the spread of inaccurate information from those accounts, the official said.

The fight against vaccine misinformation has become a top priority for the Biden administration at a time when the pace of vaccinations has slowed considerably despite the risk posed by the Delta variant, with people in many parts of the country hostile to being vaccinated.

The requests to Facebook and YouTube come after the White House reached out to Facebook, Twitter and Google in February about clamping down on Covid misinformation, seeking their help to stop it from going viral.

"Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla in the room when it comes to vaccine misinformation... but Google has a lot to answer for and somehow manages to get away with it always because people forget they own YouTube," said Imran Ahmed, CCDH founder and chief executive.

YouTube spokeswoman Elena Hernandez said that since March 2020, the company has removed over 900,000 videos containing Covid-19 misinformation and terminated YouTube channels of people identified in the CCDH report.

SOURCE: Reuters