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 Facebook, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, needs to work harder to
remove inaccurate vaccine information from its platform, Psaki said.
She said 12 people were responsible for almost 65% of anti-vaccine
misinformation on social media platforms. The finding was reported
in May by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, but Facebook has
disputed the methodology.
"All of them remain active on Facebook," Psaki said. Facebook also
"needs to move more quickly to remove harmful violative posts," she
said.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy also raised the alarm over the
growing wave of misinformation about COVID-19 and related vaccines,
saying it is making it harder to fight the pandemic and save lives.
"American lives are at risk," he said in a statement.
In his first advisory as the nation's top doctor under President Joe
Biden, Murthy called on tech companies to tweak their algorithms to
further demote false information and share more data with
researchers and the government to help teachers, healthcare workers
and the media fight misinformation.
"Health misinformation is a serious threat to public health. It can
cause confusion, sow mistrust, harm people's health, and undermine
public health efforts. Limiting the spread of health misinformation
is a moral and civic imperative," he said in the advisory, first
reported by National Public Radio.
False information feeds hesitancy to get vaccinated, leading to
preventable deaths, Murthy said, noting misinformation can affect
other health conditions and is a worldwide problem.
A Facebook spokesperson said the company has partnered with
government experts, health authorities and researchers to take
"aggressive action against misinformation about COVID-19 and
vaccines to protect public health".
"So far we've removed more than 18 million pieces of COVID
misinformation, removed accounts that repeatedly break these rules,
and connected more than 2 billion people to reliable information
about COVID-19 and COVID vaccines across our apps," the spokesperson
added.
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 Facebook has introduced rules
against making certain false claims about
COVID-19 and its vaccines. Still, researchers
and lawmakers have long complained about lax
policing of content on its site.
Murthy said at a White House press briefing that COVID-19
misinformation comes mostly from individuals who may not know they
are spreading false claims, but also a few "bad actors".
His advisory also urges people not to spread questionable
information online. The head of the Center for Countering Digital
Hate, a group that tracks COVID-19 misinformation online, said it
was inadequate.
"On tobacco packets they say that tobacco kills," the group's chief
executive Imran Ahmed told NPR. "On social media we need a 'Surgeon
General's Warning: Misinformation Kills.'"
U.S. COVID-19 infections last week rose about 11% from the previous
week, with the highest increases in areas with vaccination rates of
less than 40%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), and continued to tick up on Wednesday.
Cases plummeted in the spring as the vaccine rolled out following a
winter spike in infections, but shots have slowed and just about 51%
of the country has been vaccinated, Reuters data show https://tmsnrt.rs/3icFXMT.
"It's been hard to get people to move" from not wanting the COVID-19
vaccine "to recognizing that the risk is still there," Dr. Richard
Besser, a former CDC chief who now heads the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation, told MSNBC.
Representatives for the nation's largest tech companies could not be
immediately reached for comment on the advisory.
(Reporting by Susan Heavey, Elizabeth Culliford and Diane Bartz;
Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal, Doyinsola Oladipo, and Doina
Chiacu; Editing by Philippa Fletcher, Heather Timmons and David
Gregorio)
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