Washington:
US President Joe Biden on Monday toned down his comments about Facebook soon after accusing it of “killing people” by not stopping Covid vaccine misinformation, but he nevertheless urged the world’s biggest social network to do more.
“We are not in a war or in a battle with Facebook, we are in a battle with the virus,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.
Her remarks followed the president’s personal comments primarily walking back his blunt outburst from Friday.
“Facebook isn’t killing people,” Biden stressed in response to a reporter asking about the flap.
Biden added that he had discovered a dozen men and women had been largely accountable for disseminating false news about the vaccines.
“These 12 people who are out there giving misinformation — anyone listening to it is getting hurt by it. It’s killing people. It’s bad information,” Biden mentioned.
“My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally — that somehow I’m saying Facebook is killing people — that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine,” he mentioned.
“That’s what I meant.”
Biden had delivered an unusually harsh rebuke last week when he assailed Facebook’s handling of extensively spread misinformation about vaccinations and mentioned “this is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
His administration piled on, urging the corporation to react more rapidly in taking down problematic posts.
Facebook, which has contracted outdoors truth checkers in an work to clean up its content, rapidly fired back at the White House on Friday, with a corporation spokesperson saying “the facts show that Facebook is helping save lives. Period.”
Concerned that the US vaccination campaign is bogged down just as the harmful Delta variant is causing an surge in new infections, the White House last week notably toughened its tone against tech giants, calling on them to increase the fight against misinformation.
()