White House turns up criticism of Covid disinformation spreaders on social media

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White House turns up criticism of Covid disinformation spreaders on social media

(CNN) The White House turned up the pressure on Silicon Valley to get a handle on vaccine misinformation Thursday, specifically singling out 12 people one group dubbed the "disinformation dozen," saying they were responsible for a great deal of misinformation about Covid-19.

"There's about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday.
That statistic is from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) which identified in a report published in March about a dozen people it said were super-spreaders of anti-vaccine misinformation.
    The CCDH had at the time called on Facebook and Twitter to shut down all pages run by those people.
     
    Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent figure in the anti-vaccine movement, is among the people whom the CCDH said should be kicked off social media.
        Kennedy's page on Facebook-owned Instagram was shut down earlier this year for sharing Covid-19 misinformation, Facebook said. However, Kennedy is still allowed on Facebook (FB) itself, and he has more than 300,000 followers on the platform.
         
        Explaining why Kennedy was kicked off one of its platforms but not the other, a Facebook spokesperson told CNN Thursday, "We don't automatically disable accounts across our apps, because the accounts may post about different things on our different services."...
         
        The CCDH said Friday that 35 social media accounts tied to the people it identified have now been shut down, losing them 5.8 million followers, but 62 accounts with a total of 8.4 million followers are still active. ...
         

         
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