Defeating COVID-19 in the US is mired in a partisan information war, a fight that US President Joe Biden and Democrats in the US Congress are ill-equipped to win.
Biden’s struggle to control the disease and vaccine misinformation online was evident in his broadside on Friday last week that companies like Facebook were “killing people.”
He begged social media platforms to change and pleaded with Americans not to believe everything they read.
Illustration: Lance Liu
Google on Monday said that YouTube would start labeling health videos with information on how authoritative the source is. Twitter has said that it is working with public health authorities and would “continue to take enforcement action on content that violates our COVID-19 misleading information policy.”
Late on Monday, Twitter banned US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene for 12 hours over misinformation. In a Facebook video, the first-term Republican slammed the move as social media overreach.
“They have been censoring conservatives for far too long. Our voices are the voices that they want to cancel, and we are experiencing being canceled every single day,” Greene said.
Meanwhile, Facebook went on the counterattack in response to Biden — accusing the White House of “finger-pointing” for failing to meet its COVID-19 vaccination target — indicating that the company is already doing everything it is willing to do.
Biden’s comments came after months of meetings with social media companies to address misinformation on their platforms, a White House official said.
Discussions with Facebook in the past few months grew increasingly unproductive, and the Biden administration was unsatisfied with the company’s responses to requests for more details about its response to inaccuracies and unscientific speculation, the official said.
Still, there was not much the White House could do but complain.
On Monday, Biden walked back his earlier comments slightly, saying that online misinformation is the culprit, not the companies themselves.
Asked whether he would hold social media companies accountable, he said that he is “trying to make people look at themselves, look in the mirror,” and imagine those falsehoods going to people they care about and act accordingly.
Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) chief executive officer Imran Ahmed said that Biden’s plea reflects his frustration with the spread of vaccine inaccuracies online — and his powerlessness to fix it.
“It’s not just a morally devastating line from the president, it’s also a sign of the weakness that government has when it comes to dealing with the platforms,” Ahmed said in a telephone interview. “We’re seeing the limitations of the tools that government has right now.”
The Biden administration fell short of its goal for at least 70 percent of eligible Americans to receive one shot by July 4. Now 72.3 percent of the US’ adult population, or 186 million Americans, have received at least one dose, while at least 161 million people have completed the vaccination regime.
However, the vaccine rollout has stalled, and the gap between the most and least vaccinated counties in the US has widened, leaving many communities vulnerable to continued outbreaks.
A report from the CCDH, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting harmful content online, identified 12 users who generate 65 percent of the misleading posts about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines.
A big part of the problem is political. Republicans in Congress have excoriated social media companies for limiting the voices of some right-wing users who have contravened company policies.
US Senator Marsha Blackburn and other Republicans warn that any collaboration between Facebook and a Democratic administration to police information online is akin to censorship by authoritarian regimes.
The CCDH report has also fueled anger from Democrats who are frustrated that platforms have not taken swifter action against those who drive the bulk of false content that has prolonged the pandemic in parts of the US where vaccination hesitancy is high.
US Senator Amy Klobuchar on Sunday told CNN’s State of the Union that there is “absolutely no reason they shouldn’t be able to monitor this better and take this crap off of their platforms.”
Klobuchar, who chairs the US Senate Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, has repeatedly called for Facebook to be broken up, divesting of messenger service WhatsApp and photo-sharing platform Instagram, to force better company policies by giving consumers more choice.
Facebook vice president of integrity Guy Rosen on Saturday last week countered Biden’s criticism in a blog post, saying that vaccine acceptance among US Facebook users has increased.
The post described the company’s efforts to present “authoritative information” about COVID-19, help connect people to vaccines, remove “18 million instances of Covid-19 misinformation” and participate in a data collection effort with Carnegie Mellon University.
Robin Mejia, a statistician at the university who works on the COVID-19 project with Facebook, said that the survey routinely gets 40,000 responses a day — a valuable trove of information that paints a picture of vaccination acceptance and the virus’ spread in real time.
Mejia described the project in an interview as an example of the ability of social media to provide a useful tool for policymakers.
There are several bills languishing in Congress that would change legal protections for content that is posted and shared on social media platforms, but the proposals lack momentum amid a legislative agenda focused on infrastructure and annual spending bills.
Even if measures to change the legal liability shield in Section 230 of the US’ Communications Decency Act were to pass, it is not clear that they would address the misinformation problem.
Klobuchar, along with US Senator Mark Warner, has introduced a measure to reform Section 230, although the proposal focuses more on content that enables cyberstalking and harassment, rather than misinformation.
Other Section 230 bills include a proposal from US Senator Ed Markey to hold platforms accountable for the way they share and spread content.
Another proposal from US Representative Jan Schakowsky would require social media companies to create consumer protection programs and allow individuals to sue if the companies contravene those policies or terms of service.
However, there are limits to what the US government, including Congress, can do about online content.
Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said that COVID-19 misinformation falls into the “lawful but awful” category of speech that is protected by the First Amendment of the US constitution.
“Vaccine misinformation is often constitutionally protected material,” Goldman said. “People get scientific facts wrong all the time.”
Even if Congress pares back Section 230, making companies legally responsible for more user content, it would be hard for claimants to prove that social media firms are liable for the consequences of vaccine inaccuracies.
Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami, said that Congress could pass a law banning the spread of COVID-19 misinformation.
While the First Amendment protects many kinds of speech, a law could override technology companies’ Section 230 defense, clearing the way for more legal cases over COVID-19 misinformation on social media.
Such a law could survive a First Amendment challenge, she said.
“If we had someone wanting to sell their baked goods and they’re claiming that there’s no peanuts, when in fact it has peanuts — we don’t let them do that either,” Franks said. “You can’t lie in such a way that is going to cause measurable harm to other people.”
Nevertheless, complaints about what US conservatives describe as censorship dominated the Republican response to Biden’s comments.
Blackburn on Monday sent a letter to Biden saying that his administration’s efforts to “work with big tech companies to censor Americans’ free speech are shocking.”
Other Republicans had a similar reaction, including US Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the ranking Republican on the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, who warned against the Biden administration’s “abuse of power.”
Republican opposition presents a political risk for companies like Facebook that faced frequent criticism from former US president Donald Trump and his followers for taking action against right-wing users — including Trump himself — who breach company policies. Democrats hold the House and Senate by very thin margins, and Republicans are well-positioned to take the House majority in next year’s midterm elections.
Top tech platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and Google, have faced repeated questions from US lawmakers, and the chief executive officers of all three were in March called to testify before a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on misinformation.
US Representative Frank Pallone, the committee chairman, and several Democratic senators have written to Facebook requesting more detail about bad vaccine information.
So far, the political frustration with Facebook has not had financial consequences for the company, which became the fastest firm to reach a US$1 trillion market value, just 17 years after its founding and nine years after it went public.
“Frankly, social media companies benefit from traffic to their Web sites, regardless of what drives it,” Ahmed said. “In a broken attention market in which there are no consequences for monitoring malignant misinformation, who’s going to stop them?”
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