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The White House is not backing down from its strong criticism of Facebook after President Biden accused the social media giant on Friday of “killing people” with misinformation about coronavirus vaccinations.
A source in the Biden administration revealed to Fox News on Saturday that Facebook’s very public appeal followed months of frustration with the platform for failing to eliminate “dangerous” information about the vaccinations that has spread. online.
The White House has requested help from Facebook and other social media sites since February to prevent misinformation from going viral, such as the myth that getting vaccinated will lead to infertility.
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While Facebook has made positive public statements about how it has partnered with the government and taken aggressive action to tackle vaccine misinformation, the White House believes Big Tech has failed.
“They withheld information about the rules, which they put in place to prevent dangerous misinformation from spreading [and] how they measure if it’s working, ”a Biden administration official told Fox News.
Tensions have reached a boiling point amid the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant, young people’s reluctance to the vaccine and polls showing the majority of unvaccinated people believe myths about the vaccine.
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As coronavirus cases are on the rise and vaccination rates have slowed in the United States, the White House this week launched an effort to combat misinformation, starting with a warning from US surgeon general Vivek Murthy on Thursday that false information about the coronavirus is an “urgent threat” to public health.
The Surgeon General’s office has released a new report titled “Dealing with Health Misinformation,” which makes recommendations for social media platforms to “impose clear consequences for accounts that repeatedly violate platform policies. “.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki also announced Thursday that the Biden administration had “flagged” the content to be removed for Facebook.
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“We are reporting problematic Facebook posts that spread misinformation. We work with doctors and medical experts… who are popular with their audiences with accurate information,” she said. “So we help deliver content that you trust. “
Biden went one step further on Friday, claiming that Facebook and other platforms’ inaction to suppress false information is costing people their lives from preventable disease.
“The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and they are killing people,” Biden said.
The White House comments drew a quick reprimand from Facebook.
“The White House is looking for scapegoats for missing its vaccination targets,” a Facebook spokesperson told NBC’s Dylan Beyers.
And while the White House has a public row with big tech giant, some Republicans and critics accuse the White House of being too comfortable with Facebook in their efforts to remove posts they deem problematic.
“Democrats are all about the First Amendment, except when they don’t like what it says,” Representative Lance Gooden, R-Texas, told Fox News on Saturday. Gooden recently formed a House caucus aimed at mastering Big Tech.
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“Normalizing the government’s collusion with Big Tech to censor anything they consider disinformation actually puts our First Amendment rights at risk,” Gooden said.
Fox News’s Audrey Conklin contributed to this report.
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