Top legal eagles urge web giants to do more in this life and death matter
In testimonies from the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter to Congress, published on Wednesday ahead of a hearing this week on internet disinformation, the trio revealed their efforts to remove misinformation from their platforms. “People want to see accurate information on Facebook, and so do we,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote. “That’s why we have made fighting misinformation and providing people with authoritative information a priority for the company. We have recalibrated our products and built global partnerships to combat misinformation on a massive scale.” Google’s Sundar Pichai explained the same: “This past year we’ve also focused on providing quality information during the pandemic. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, teams across Google have worked to provide quality information and resources to help keep people safe, and to provide six public health, scientists and medical professionals with tools to combat the pandemic,“ he said. „We’ve launched more than 200 new products, features and initiatives—including the Exposure Notification API to assist contact tracing—and have pledged over $1bn to assist our users, customers and partners around the world.” Likewise Twitter, which peppered this paragraph in its testimony with no less than 10 hyperlinks: “We have COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation policies, as well as a COVID information hub. Our civic integrity and platform manipulation policies are available on our Help Center, along with information on our bans on state-controlled media advertising and political advertising. As a follow-up to our preliminary post-election update, we are conducting a review of the 2020 US election, the findings of which we intend to share.” So it may be surprising that, also on Wednesday, no less than 12 state Attorneys General sent a letter [PDF] to the same tech CEOs accusing them of doing far too little to combat COVID misinformation on their platforms. “We write to express our concern about the use of your platforms to spread fraudulent information about coronavirus vaccines and to seek your cooperation in curtailing the dissemination of such information,” they state, adding: “Misinformation disseminated via your platforms has increased vaccine hesitancy, which will slow economic recovery and, more importantly, ultimately cause even more unnecessary deaths.
