Psaki says administration is working with Facebook to limit COVID misinformation
Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy has a heated exchange with Press Secretary Jen Psaki
Conservative commentator and author Mark Levin slammed the Biden administration for its relationship with Silicon Valley in its bid to halt the spread of misinformation concerning vaccines.
"[The Biden administration is] working with Facebook and other social media platforms, and telling them what they want them to do. They can call it disinformation, they can call it whatever they want, that's quite beside the point," Levin said Thursday on his radio show. Social media platforms are "doing the work of the government, it is doing the work specifically of the Biden administration and the Democrat Party," he added.
His comments came in response to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy detailing the White House’s relationship with Facebook on Thursday to stop misinformation on vaccine safety.
Psaki doubled down on the administration's relationship with Facebook on Friday and said it is "making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives," and even added that if a user is banned from one platform "for providing misinformation" that user should be banned from all others.
"We don't take anything down. We don't block anything, Facebook, and any private sector company makes decisions about what information should be on their platform," Psaki said in defense of the relationship and reported this week that 12 people are to blame for 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms.
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Levin, however, argued that Facebook is not a private company due to this relationship.
He added that Psaki's comments also make former President Donald Trump's lawsuit against Big Tech a "slam dunk," and said he hopes Trump's lawyers were listening and to take note that the current administration is telling Silicon Valley "what they want them to do."
"The Biden administration at multiple levels - senior staff, among others - are working with Facebook and other social media platforms to identify misinformation and thereby to sanction the misinformation and censor the social media posts, and to spread information. It can no longer be said that it is an independent business, conducting its own business," Levin said.
President Joe Biden argued, however, that misinformation on social media platforms was the matter of life and death, accusing the tech companies of "killing people" by allowing misinformation to remain on their platforms.
"I mean they really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that’s -- they’re killing people," Biden said Friday on the South Lawn of the White House.
PSAKI SAYS ADMINISTRATION IS WORKING WITH FACEBOOK TO LIMIT MISINFORMATION
During Levin's show, he specifically took issue with Psaki saying the federal government has "increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation."
Levin responded that the government is "tracking you if they don’t agree with you."
"They're collecting information if they don't agree with you. They have adapted and they are out front now that they are using police state tactics against freedom of speech and speech generally," he said.
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The conservative host also noted that members of the Biden administration, such as Vice President Kamala Harris, resisted the vaccine when the Trump administration first began rolling it out and are now working to censor people who are doing the same.
"Biden and Harris, and their ilk opposed the vaccines early on they dismissed them. They said they were politicized. Remember? I remember."
"Remember how many people in the media, and Big Tech rejected the idea that the virus may have been leaked from the lab and Wuhan?" he asked, referring to Facebook outright banning posts last year that discussed the theory that the virus came from a Chinese lab.
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The Wuhan lab theory was largely panned as a conspiracy before it regained traction in the mainstream this year, with Biden ordering a review of the theory and the World Health Organization acknowledging it was premature to discount the idea.
"Politicians in government working with liberal Democrats who control these massive platforms censoring misinformation. Isn't that amazing? The same ones that promoted Russia collusion, the same ones that silenced the New York Post when it came to Hunter Biden," he added.
Facebook did not immediately respond to Fox News’s request for comment on Levin’s remarks.
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