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Asked about this at her Wednesday briefing, Ms. Murthy’s approach and welcomed his partnership.Ĭalling out tech and media companies is tricky business, and the White House has danced around the question of whether it would try to regulate companies like Facebook that have become platforms for health disinformation. YouTube said in a statement that it welcomed many aspects of the surgeon general’s report. “We permanently ban pages, groups and accounts that repeatedly break our rules on Covid misinfo, and this includes more than a dozen pages, groups and accounts from some of the individuals referenced in the press briefing today,” said Dani Lever, a spokeswoman for Facebook. And that’s why this advisory that I issued today has recommendations for everyone. Now we need an all-of-society approach to fight misinformation. And their algorithms tend to give us more of what we click on, pulling us deeper and deeper into a well of misinformation. They’ve designed product features such as like buttons that reward us for sharing emotionally charged content, not accurate content. They’ve allowed people to intentionally spread misinformation, what we call disinformation, to have extraordinary reach. Modern technology companies have enabled misinformation to poison our information environment with little accountability to their users. Simply put, health information has cost us lives. This has led to avoidable illnesses and death.
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It’s led them to turn down proven treatments and to choose not to get vaccinated. During the Covid-19 pandemic, health misinformation has led people to resist wearing masks in high-risk settings. And while it often appears innocuous on social media apps and retail sites or search engines, the truth is that misinformation takes away our freedom to make informed decisions about our health and the health of our loved ones. Health misinformation is false, inaccurate or misleading information about health, according to the best evidence at the time. And while those threats have often been related to what we eat, drink and smoke, today, we live in a world where misinformation poses an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health. Surgeon general advisories are reserved for urgent public health threats. Today, I issued a surgeon general’s advisory on the dangers of health misinformation.
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Vivek Murthy, called for a national effort to stop the spread of misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines and accused tech and social media companies of exacerbating the problem. Transcript Tech Companies ‘Enabled Misinformation,’ Surgeon General Says The U.S.