Biden’s Facebook attack followed months of frustration inside the White House

“The reality is that disinformation continues to spread like wildfire in our country, aided and abetted by technology platforms,” ​​Dr Murthy told Fox News on Sunday. He admitted that companies like Facebook had taken steps to deal with false vaccine information, but added, “It’s not enough.”

Facebook has dismissed criticism from the Biden administration. The company posted a blog post on Saturday saying it was not responsible for Mr Biden’s failure to meet his publicly stated target of 70% of U.S. adults receiving at least one dose of the vaccine by on July 4 and that 85% of its users in the United States have been or wish to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Facebook also said it was doing its part to help get more Americans vaccinated, for example by operating pop-up vaccination clinics in low-income and underserved communities in California and other states.

Despite the heated rhetoric, administration officials suggested they had few concrete policy options to crack down on disinformation, other than public pressure on social media companies.

Yet the conflict has further complicated Facebook’s profile in Washington – both left and right – on everything from disinformation to its economic and political clout. As the company comes under attack from the White House for failing to do more to monitor the posts, some Republicans have accused it of stifling free speech. The Biden administration “addresses the monopolies and says, ‘You are our tool to censor opinions with which we do not agree,'” Sen. Ted Cruz (R., TX) said on Fox News on Sunday. .

The weekend’s exchanges followed a week in which senior officials in the Biden administration went on a rampage on Facebook and other social media companies.

The surgeon general issued an advisory on Thursday warning against health misinformation, alleging that social media companies “have allowed misinformation to poison our news environment, with little accountability to their users.”

On Friday, Mr Biden accused social media companies such as Facebook of killing people by failing to do more to suppress false claims about the vaccine. “They are killing people,” he said in response to a question about companies like Facebook. “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they kill people.

“The facts show that Facebook is helping to save lives. Period, ”Facebook spokesman Kevin McAlister said in response to Mr. Biden’s remarks.

False accounts that Covid-19 vaccines lead to widespread deaths and that the US government is mandating vaccines have more than doubled on major social media platforms in the past three months, according to Zignal Labs Inc. Others include de False claims that vaccines are really microchips and that vaccines alter people’s DNA, the media analysis company said.

Mr Biden and Facebook have long enjoyed a frosty relationship, although the current situation appears to have exacerbated tensions as the president seeks to control the spread of the coronavirus. Facebook’s quick rebuttal and suggestion that the administration is “pointing fingers” show the company’s plans to defend itself publicly.

“Facebook’s immediate defense on health disinformation shows they feel pressure internally to clarify their position,” said Joan Donovan, research director at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University .

The administration’s confrontational approach marked a change for Mr Biden and his team, who began meeting with social media companies during the presidential transition in a bid to strengthen protections against disinformation, US officials said. . They met executives including those from Facebook, Twitter,

YouTube, Snapchat and Pinterest.

But in recent months, behind-the-scenes discussions with Facebook have become increasingly unproductive, according to officials, who said they were unhappy with the company’s responses to their requests for more information on how which she was reacting to the influx of disinformation.

Convinced that private negotiations had little hope of success, senior officials in the Biden administration decided to step up public pressure on Facebook this week as the White House grew worried about slowing vaccinations and of the spread of the highly transmissible variant Delta.

Administration officials have called on social media companies to provide researchers with more data on the type and extent of disinformation on their platforms and to change their algorithms to limit the spread of false claims. They also lobbied companies to enforce their rules uniformly across multiple platforms.

Officials initially had high hopes for conversations with social media companies in recent months, believing Mr Biden’s team and Facebook could put aside their differences to help fight the pandemic.

In meetings with Facebook, administration officials Biden urged the company to explain how it measures the success of the disinformation response, where the disinformation is coming from, and what impact the disinformation has on users, said. said a senior administration official. The responses in response were not satisfactory, in the opinion of senior officials. Some in the administration came to believe that the company’s approach had fundamental flaws and that its standards were not high enough, the official said.

The official said the administration was less concerned with individual false or misleading messages than with amplifying and routing users to those messages.

Although the administration does not regularly report specific content to Facebook, according to assistants, officials have occasionally referred to examples that they said appeared to violate the spirit of the company’s anti-disinformation efforts. An example cited by an administration official: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who questioned the effectiveness and safety of vaccines, was banned from Instagram, but not from Facebook. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for $ 1 billion.

Mr Kennedy said on Sunday that any conversation between the administration and Facebook about his social media posts would amount to unconstitutional government censorship.

“Misinformation. The term has nothing to do with lying. It is any statement that deviates from official statements and proclamations,” he said, adding: “There is no pandemic exception to the Bill of Rights. ”

Facebook said it does not automatically deactivate accounts on its apps for repeated violation of its community’s standards because accounts may post information on different topics on its services. But in May 2019, the company banned several personalities whose views it deemed too inflammatory to share on all of its services, including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, far-right talk show host Alex Jones and Jewish conservative activist Laura Loomer. Facebook said it only permanently banned repeat offenders on its platforms.

Facebook said it has already taken action on the Surgeon General’s eight recommendations on what tech companies can do to help.

—Chad Day contributed to this article.

Write to Andrew Restuccia at [email protected] and Sarah E. Needleman at [email protected]