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© Reuters.File photo: Vivek Murthy spoke at his confirmation hearing before the Senate’s health, education, labor, and pension commitments, serving as the medical director of the public health service regular army and a public health service surgeon
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WASHINGTON (Reuters)-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Thursday that Facebook has not done enough to prevent the spread of false claims about COVID-19 and vaccines as part of the new administration’s counterattack against misinformation in the United States.
Psaki said that Facebook (NASDAQ:), which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, needs to work harder to remove inaccurate vaccine information from its platform.
She said that 12 people are responsible for nearly 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. The Anti-Digital Hate Center reported this finding in May, but Facebook disputed the method.
“All of them are active on Facebook,” Psaki said. She said that Facebook also “needs to delete harmful and illegal posts more quickly.”
US surgeon Vivek Murthy also warned of the increasing number of misinformation about COVID-19 and related vaccines, saying that it makes fighting the pandemic and saving lives more difficult.
“The lives of Americans are in danger,” he said in a statement.
In President Joe Biden’s first consultation as a top doctor in the United States, Murty called on technology companies to adjust algorithms to further reduce false information and share more data with researchers and the government to help teachers , Medical staff and the media crack down on misinformation.
“Health misinformation is a serious threat to public health. It can cause confusion, spread mistrust, harm people’s health and undermine public health. Limiting the spread of health misinformation is a moral and civic priority,” he said in the consultation. , First reported by the National Public Radio.
Murthy said that false information can cause people to hesitate to get vaccinated, leading to preventable deaths, and pointed out that misinformation can affect other health conditions and is a global problem.
A Facebook spokesperson said that the company has cooperated with government experts, health authorities and researchers to take “active actions to combat misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines in order to protect public health.”
The spokesperson added: “So far, we have deleted more than 18 million COVID error messages, deleted accounts that repeatedly violated these rules, and connected more than 2 billion people to information about COVID-19 and COVID through our app. Reliable information about vaccines.”
Facebook has established rules that prohibit certain false claims about COVID-19 and its vaccine. Despite this, researchers and lawmakers have long complained about the lack of strict supervision of the content on their websites.
Murthy said at the White House press conference that COVID-19 misinformation mainly comes from individuals who may not know that they are spreading false statements, but there are also some “bad guys.”
His advice also urges people not to spread suspicious information online. The head of the Counter Digital Hate Center, an organization that tracks misinformation about COVID-19 online, said that this is not enough.
“On tobacco packaging, they say that tobacco will kill people,” Imran Ahmed, the organization’s chief executive, told NPR. “On social media, we need a’surgeon’s warning: wrong information can lead to death’.”
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the COVID-19 infection rate in the United States last week increased by about 11% compared to the previous week, with the largest increase in areas where the vaccination rate was less than 40%, and continued to rise on Wednesday.
Reuters data shows https://tmsnrt.rs/3icFXMT. With the launch of the vaccine after the surge in the number of infections in winter, the number of cases dropped sharply in the spring, but the vaccination rate has slowed down. Only about 51% of the country has been vaccinated. .
“It is difficult to make people change from not wanting the COVID-19 vaccine” to “recognizing that the risk still exists,” Dr. Richard Bessel, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who is now the head of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told MSNBC.
A representative of the largest technology company in the United States could not be immediately reached for comment on the advisory opinion.
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