The White House has YouTube, not just Facebook, on its list of social media platforms that are accused of spreading false information about COVID vaccines and are not doing enough to stop it, say sources familiar with management thinking.
The criticism comes just a week after President Joe Biden called Facebook and social media companies “killers” for failing to curb the spread of false information about policies. Ever since he softened his voice.
A senior management official said one of the key issues was “incompatible coercion.” YouTube – a unit of Alphabet’s Google – and Facebook are deciding what is appropriate as false information on their platforms. But the results have left the White House unhappy.
“Facebook and YouTube … are judges, judges and investigators when it comes to what happens in their forums,” said a management official explaining how they work with COVID’s false information. “They came to organize their own homework.”
Some of the key pieces of misinformation by the Biden authorities are being drafted, including that the COVID-19 drugs are ineffective, falsely claiming to contain microchips and harming female fertility, the official said.
Media outlets have now been widely accused by Biden, his journalist, Jen Psaki, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, all of whom say that the spread of false policies makes it harder to fight the epidemic and save lives.
A recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), also released by the White House, showed that 12 vaccine accounts distributed about two-thirds of non-prescription drug information online. Six of those accounts are still posting to YouTube.
“We would like to see more done by everyone” to prevent the spread of inaccurate information from those accounts, the official said.
Fighting untrue information about the vaccine has become a priority for Biden officials at a time when the pace of vaccination has dropped dramatically despite the risk of delta diversity, and people in many parts of the country are vaccinated.
Applications to Facebook and YouTube came after White House reached out to Facebook, Twitter and Google in February about the reduction of COVID’s false information, seeking their help to prevent it from passing, a senior official said at the time.
“Facebook is an 800-pound giraffe in the room when it comes to negative immunization information … but Google has a lot to answer for and somehow manage to escape all the time because people forget they belong to YouTube,” said Imran Ahmed, CCMH founder and CEO.
YouTube spokeswoman Elena Hernandez said that since March 2020, the company has removed more than 900,000 videos containing inappropriate information for COVID-19 and deleted YouTube channels for people identified in the CCDH report. He said company policies were based on the content of the video, not on the speaker.
“If there are any other channels mentioned in the report that violate our policies, we will take action, including permanent termination,” he said.
On Monday, YouTube also said it would include reliable health information and tabs for audiences to click on.
The chief executive officer mentioned four issues that management had asked on Facebook to provide certain information, but the company had been reluctant to follow that up.
This includes how many vaccination details are available on its platform, who sees the wrong claims, what the company is doing to reach out to them and how Facebook knows that the action being taken works.
The official said the responses provided by Facebook were “not enough.” Facebook spokesman Kevin McAlister said the company had removed more than 18 million pieces of COVID-19 inaccurate information since the epidemic began and that its data showed that for U.S.
users using the platform, drug suspicion had dropped by 50 percent since January and acceptance of vaccines was high. .
In a separate blog post last Saturday, Facebook urged managers to stop “pointing fingers,” citing steps we had taken to encourage users to get vaccinated.
But the management official said the blog post had no success rates. What worries most of Biden’s management is that the platforms “may be lying about us and hiding the ball, or they may not take it seriously and there is no in-depth analysis of what is happening on their platforms,” the official said. “That costs whatever solutions they have.”
