WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 31: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta testifies before the Senate Judiciary ... [ ] Committee at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on January 31, 2024 (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg got a lot of attention for his letter last week to Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman Jim Jordan saying that his teams were “pressured” by the Biden White House to censor some content about COVID-19. But it’s the White House’s response we should be paying attention to, as it highlights a grave and escalating problem.
"When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety.” The White House asserted. “Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present.”
Earlier this year, on the fourth anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, I posted a commentary that identified disinformation as the top threat to Americans’ health. In contrast to misinformation—the sharing of false or misleading claims without knowing they are untrue—disinformation is deliberately created, planted and spread to achieve economic, political, or strategic goals. The pandemic amplified both problems.
In the spring of 2020, only two months after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, Carnegie Mellon University researchers reported that more than 80% of the top 50 influential retweeters of coronavirus posts were bots. Wikipedia defines an internet bot as a software application designed to “run automated tasks........