A group of Democratic lawmakers wrote a letter to Biden last week to urge that he add an expert to his coronavirus task force to address misinformation. The lawmakers recommended that he select Joan Donovan, one of the leading researchers studying coronavirus misinformation.
“Understanding and addressing misinformation — and the wider phenomena of declining public trust in institutions, political polarization, networked social movements, and online information environments that create fertile grounds for the spread of falsehoods — is a critical part of our nation’s public health response,” the lawmakers, led by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health, wrote. “Perhaps nowhere is this more pressing than in our efforts to encourage adoption of COVID-19 vaccines.”
The letter highlights the huge challenge the Biden administration will inherit in combating health misinformation.
President Trump was one of the leading sources of misinformation about the health crisis. One of the most pressing issues for Biden will be to turn the tide and find engaging ways to spread factual information about the coronavirus – especially online.
Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, expressed concern about the high number of Americans who are buying into misinformation about the coronavirus.
“There are a substantial proportion of people who do think this is not real, that it’s fake news, or it’s a hoax,” This is extraordinary. I’ve never seen this before,” Fauci said at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit last week.
Fauci said he’s advising the Biden administration to make uniting the public against misinformation a key priority: “We have all got to be on the same page telling the American public we have to pull together. That, to me, is the most important thing.”
Already some experts working on the coronavirus task force are thinking about the massive public communications challenge. For instance, Atul Gawande, one of the task force’s co-chairs, recently warned in a New Yorker interview that the anti-vaccine movement could complicate the vaccine rollout. He also said the administration is going to have to address a great deal of public confusion because states are rolling out the vaccine differently.
“I’m concerned that what will happen when the new Administration starts is that they will inherit a lot of public confusion, because each state is now coming to its own conclusion about how they’re going to prioritize things,” Gwande said. “There’s going to be such demand. People are going to clamor for this vaccine. And, if they think that the system is rigged, we will have even more trouble.”
But it won’t be an easy task as authoritative sources of health information struggle to get strong engagement on social media.
Tech companies have promised to take steps to combat the spread of misinformation. Facebook has said it will take down false claims that could include misinformation about the safety, efficacy, ingredients or side effects of the coronavirus vaccines. That’s an escalation in how Facebook typically handles health misinformation, my colleague Elizabeth Dwoskin reported. YouTube previously announced a similar policy, and Twitter is still developing its policy for coronavirus vaccine misinformation.
But for years, accounts promoting the anti-vax movement and other dubious health information have flourished on such services. Just last week, Facebook removed a dozen of pages that were coordinating to share content from websites that posted falsehoods about the flu vaccine, covid-19 and other health issues. These websites had ten times more engagement than leading public health authorities on Facebook, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.
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Google suffered a widespread outage early Monday morning impacting Gmail, YouTube and other services.
The outages highlighted how increasingly reliant businesses, schools and individuals have become on Google’s services during the pandemic. It also underscored the risks of having so many services – ranging from workplace productivity tools, personal entertainment and key communication channels – tied up with a single company.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the outage. It was not immediately clear what caused it.
Angry users took to Twitter to express their frustration they were unable to access key services. Outages like this one are fairly common for smaller tech companies, but it’s rare for a company with the size and scale of Google to see so many services down for such an extended period of time.
Russian government hackers compromised the nation’s top Internet and telecommunications policy agency.
Russian hackers with the nation’s foreign intelligence service targeted the Treasury and Commerce departments, including the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Ellen Nakashima reports. The FBI is investigating the campaign, which has been active for months.
It is not clear what information the hackers accessed or what they were after. The National Security Council called an emergency meeting on Saturday to address the matter, Reuters first reported.
“The United States government is aware of these reports and we are taking all necessary steps to identify and remedy any possible issues related to this situation,” NSC spokesman John Ullyot said. He did not comment on the country or group responsible.
The same group hacked the State Department during the Obama administration and compromised the services of the Democratic National Committee in 2015. The Washington Post reported last week that the same Russian hacking group breached the cybersecurity firm FireEye, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Huawei worked with dozens of security contractors to develop surveillance products, marketing materials reveal.
Chinese-language marketing materials on Huawei’s site showed partnerships with at least four companies that promoted ethnic-tracking capabilities, Eva Dou and Drew Harwell report.
The company faces scrutiny over its human rights practices after The Washington Post last week first reported its partnership with a Chinese firm to design a “Uighur alarm.”
The extent of Huawei’s role in China’s growing surveillance market targeted at ethnic minorities was previously unreported. Huawei already faces national security scrutiny from the U.S. government over concerns that its telecommunication systems could aid Chinese government spying. Several of the companies Huawei partnered with were sanctioned by the Commerce Department last year for working with the Chinese government on the surveillance of its Uighur population.
“We take the allegations in The Washington Post’s article very seriously and are investigating the issues raised within,” a Huawei spokesperson said in a statement to The Post. “We do not develop or sell systems that identify people by their ethnic group, and we do not condone the use of our technologies to discriminate against or oppress members of any community.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar is calling for more consumer privacy protections for health-tracker data.
The Democrat representing Minnesota raised concerns about the new Amazon Halo device to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar after a Washington Post review detailed the extensive personal data collected by the new fitness tracker, Geoffrey A. Fowler reports.
“I think that this is even more intrusive than many of these products — and I had already been concerned,” Klobuchar said in an interview. “This one just takes it to the Nth degree.”
Halo goes a step further than current fitness trackers on the market by collecting body photos and voice recordings for analysis. Amazon says that it does not sell user data without permission, but nothing under federal law requires commercial fitness devices to keep those promises. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
In her letter to Azar, Klobuchar asks what steps the agency has taken to require fitness trackers like Halo to safeguard users’ information and what authority the agency has to introduce regulations.
Klobuchar previously introduced legislation that would mandate that HHS create regulations for health apps and devices not covered by existing laws. Klobuchar also previously raised concerns about the data amassed by fitness trackers when Google acquired Fitbit last year.
Amazon spokeswoman Molly Wade said the company is reviewing the letter and is in touch with Klobuchar’s office. “Privacy is foundational to how we designed and built Amazon Halo. Body and Tone are both optional features that are not required to use the product,” she said.
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Oracle joins other companies in decamping from Silicon Valley.
It follows Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which announced it would move its headquarters to Houston earlier this month. Tesla chief executive Elon Musk also recently moved to Austin and is building a new plant in the city.
Oracle says it will continue to support its Redwood City office, among others, and employees will be able to chose their location or work from home.
Big-data company Palantir relocated to Denver earlier this year, citing a culture clash with Silicon Valley. Oracle founder Larry Ellison is one of Silicon Valley’s rare Trump supporters. But unlike Palantir, neither he nor Oracle chief executive Safra Catz mentioned culture as a reason for the move.
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- Washington Post Live will hold a virtual event on the future of work with Slack chief executive Stewart Butterfield and Box CEO Aaron Levie on Tuesday at 12:15 p.m.
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SNL imagines what a sports channel from Trump-favorite Newsmax would look like:
