Ron Klain, President Biden’s chief of staff, said that working with Silicon Valley would be a priority as the administration tries to run counterprogramming against anti-vaxxers.
Meanwhile, a group of senators, led by Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), sent a letter yesterday to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg urging them to increase transparency about efforts to fight vaccine-related misinformation.
“It is imperative that you be transparent about the amount of harmful misinformation that appears on your platforms and the effectiveness of your efforts to remove this content, so that public health organizations and experts can respond appropriately,” the senators wrote.
Health misinformation will be a major focus of Washington in 2021 — and it could have significant influence over efforts to regulate the tech industry.
Democrats have been extremely critical of the tech companies’ hands-off approach to falsehoods since the 2016 election, when Russian actors sowed disinformation on Facebook and other platforms to divide the American public. Now that they’re in charge in Washington, expect them to use their control of the White House and key committees to force Silicon Valley companies to take greater responsibility for disinformation.
In their letter, the senators urged the companies to share data about how the amount of reports and removals of coronavirus content they’ve processed since the pandemic began, as well as details about the average time such misinformation remains online before being detected and removed. The lawmakers also asked the companies for updates on their new policies, as well as new information on partnerships with public health and civil rights organizations.
“As we continue to battle this pandemic and advance a national vaccine strategy, it is vital that your platforms—which millions of Americans use on a daily basis—do not spread content that can harm the health of Americans,” the lawmakers wrote.
Democrats’ focus on the issue stands in sharp contrast to the previous administration. Researchers found President Trump was one of the primary drivers of misinformation about the coronavirus. Researchers at Cornell University analyzed 38 million articles about the pandemic, and mentions of Trump made up nearly 38 percent of the overall “misinformation conversation.”
Tech companies have adopted strict policies against coronavirus vaccine misinformation.
Facebook, Twitter and Google have taken steps to limit misinformation about the vaccine. But they’ve repeatedly struggled to enforce their rules on misinformation — and experts warn allowing anti-vaxxers to use their platforms unchecked for so long has now made policing the conversation more difficult.
Companies are responding with new experiments in content moderation.
Twitter announced a new fact-checking program yesterday. A pilot program called Birdwatch will let selected users write corrections and fact checks on potentially misleading tweets, my colleague Elizabeth Dwoskin reported.
And Facebook recently stood up an independent oversight board, which Zuckerberg says will have final say over some of the thorniest issues involving online speech. The company has asked that board — which is made up of independent experts including a former prime minister and a Nobel Peace Prize winner — to decide whether it should restore Trump’s account.
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Google will not make political contributions to lawmakers who voted against certifying the presidential election results.
Many companies are reevaluating their political donations in the wake of the deadly Capitol riot, Ashley Gold reports for Axios. Facebook paused all contributions as it reviews its policies, and Microsoft also temporarily halted contributions while it seeks feedback from employees.
“After the disturbing events at the Capitol, NetPAC paused all contributions while undertaking a review,” José Castañeda, a Google spokesman told Ashley. “Following that review, the NetPAC board has decided that it will not be making any contributions this cycle to any member of Congress who voted against certification of the election results.”
Congress was extremely active in 2019 and 2020 — on social media.
Lawmakers produced more than 2.2 million tweets and Facebook posts in 2019 and 2020, according to a Pew Research Center report. All told, the median member of Congress produced more than 3,000 posts on the two platforms during that time period.
The 116th Congress produced about 738,000 more social media posts than the 114th Congress of 2015 and 2016, the first one where Pew tracked such data. Twitter was the most popular social media platform among lawmakers. Members of the 116th Congress produced more than two times as many tweets as Facebook posts during the two-year session.
User engagement with lawmakers’ tweets is also on the rise. The total number of users who follow members of Congress on Twitter or Facebook has almost tripled over the past six years.
Signal employees are sounding the alarm as the messaging app’s popularity grows.
The encrypted messaging app has surged in popularity after its chief competitor, Facebook-owned WhatsApp, announced changes to its privacy policy that alarmed some users. But it’s vulnerable to abuse, employees tell Platformer’s Casey Newton, and its libertarian approach to content moderation has raised eyebrows among its workforce.
They say its new features, such as group links and the ability to create usernames, present challenges. And the app doesn’t have a tough content policy — nor does it appear to have a plan if extremists begin using it, Newton reports.
“The world needs products like Signal — but they also need Signal to be thoughtful,” Gregg Bernstein, a former user researcher who left the organization this month over his concerns, told Platformer. “It’s not only that Signal doesn’t have these policies in place. But they’ve been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.”
Like almost all apps, Signal’s terms of service say that the product cannot be used to break the law. But the company has largely sought to take a hands-off approach to moderation.
“We think a lot on the product side about what it is that we’re building, how it’s used, and the kind of behaviors that we’re trying to incentivize,” Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike told Newton. “The overriding theme there is that we don’t want to be a media company. We’re not algorithmically amplifying content. We don’t have access to the content. And even within the app, there are not a lot of opportunities for amplification.”
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The digital race to 2020
Facebook will allow researchers to access ad-targeting data from the 2020 election.
Researchers on Monday will be able to access targeting information for more than 1.3 million ads that ran from Aug. 3 to Nov. 3, the company announced on Monday. It’ll give researchers the ability to see targeting criteria such as location and interests for ads.
Historically, Facebook has clashed with researchers over its database of political ads. In October, the company demanded that New York University researchers stop collecting targeting information, saying in a letter that “scraping tools, no matter how well-intentioned, are not a permissible means of collecting information from us.”
Facebook is one of several social media companies that have come under fire for polarizing and radicalizing content online. On Monday, two Republicans on the House Oversight Committee including the committee’s top Republican, James Comer (R-Ky.), asked Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) to revise her request that the FBI investigate conservative social media network Parler, and include Facebook and Twitter as well.
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Daybook
- Aparna Bawa, chief operating officer of Zoom, speaks at a Washington Post Live event on the video platform and the future of work today at 11 a.m.
- Microsoft holds a call to discuss its earnings with investors today at 5:30 p.m.
- Apple, Facebook and Tesla hold investor calls on their earnings on Wednesday at 5 p.m., 5 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., respectively.
- The House Energy and Commerce Committee holds its formal organizational meeting on Wednesday at 1 p.m.
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