White House increases pressure on Big Tech firms to act on vaccine misinformation 

With the aim totacklevaccine misinformation,White Househas increased pressure over the Big Tech companies in theSilicon Valley.

TheWhite House hassingled out 12 people, who arebeing dubbed as the 'disinformation dozen’as they seem to have beenresponsible for a great deal of misinformationbeing circulatedabout COVID-19.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said,"There's about 12 people,who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms."

Add WION as a Preferred Source

Thenon-profit Centrefor Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has released the statisticsin a report published in March, which saidabout a dozen people were super-spreaders of anti-vaccine misinformation.At the time, the CCDH hadaskedFacebook and Twitter to shut down all pages run by these people.

Earlier, Twitter was looking to deploy human monitors to crack down on disinformation as COVID-19 shots were being rolled out across the world.

The microblogging platformwas thinking oflabellingtweets that include misleading information about coronavirus vaccines.

Twitter said it has started using human reviewers to assess whether tweets violate its policy against Covid vaccine misinformation. Eventually, the work will be done by a combination of humans and automation, it said.

It will be using a'strike system'to eventually remove accounts that repeatedly violate its rules.

"Through the use of the strike system, we hope to educate people on why certain content breaks our rules so they have the opportunity to further consider theirbehaviourand their impact on the public conversation," Twitter said in a blog post on Monday.

"We believe the strike system will help to educate the public on our policies and further reduce the spread of potentially harmful and misleading information on Twitter, particularly for repeated moderate and high-severity violations of our rules," the company said.

(Withinputs from agencies)