Inside the White House-Facebook Rift Over Vaccine Misinformation

The meetings, which began in December, were attended by Dr. Vivek Murthy, who would later be named the surgeon general; D.J. Patil, the chief technology officer for Mr. Biden’s transition team; and Rob Flaherty, Mr. Biden’s director of digital strategy. They said they wanted to ensure that people hesitant about getting the vaccine received accurate information about the shots.

The officials asked the tech companies to prevent false statements about the virus from circulating. The officials also asked the companies how many “fence sitters,” people hesitant about getting vaccinated, were exposed to misinformation on their sites.

Over the next weeks, many of the social media companies struggled to eradicate health misinformation. But some shared information the White House sought.

YouTube presented data showing that about 16 out of 10,000 views violated its content rules, although it didn’t specify how much video content was related to Covid-19 misinformation. Twitter said it had opened its data for researchers and academics to study the spread of misinformation on the site, and shared with the White House that it had created a “strikes” system to better police accounts that spread the most Covid misinformation.

Facebook provided information from a data-tracking tool it owns, CrowdTangle, which is used by academics and journalists. But Facebook officials, including Brian Rice, the company’s top Democratic lobbyist to the White House, and Kang-Xing Jin, Facebook’s head of health, skirted some requests for more information, some people close to the administration said.

When Mr. Patil asked for data on how often misinformation was viewed and spread, the company said it couldn’t provide that kind of data. Facebook told White House officials that it grappled with content that wasn’t explicitly false, such as posts that cast doubt about vaccines but don’t clearly violate the social network’s rules on health misinformation. Facebook allows people to express their experiences with vaccines, such as pain or side effects after receiving a shot, as long as they don’t explicitly endorse falsehoods.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/facebook-vaccine-misinformation.html