In an official statement, Murthy asked major tech platforms to provide information about the prevalence and scale of COVID-19 claims on their sites, from social networks, search engines, crowdsourced platforms, e-commerce platforms, and instant messaging systems.
Last summer, the Surgeon General issued an advisory calling health misinformation an “urgent threat” and pressing tech and social media platforms to redesign algorithms to reduce misinformation amplification and bolster their monitoring of it.
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“It can cause confusion, sow distrust, and undermine public health efforts, including our ongoing work to end the COVID-19 pandemic,” Murthy said in a statement in July.
During the pandemic, COVID-19 misinformation extended rapidly amid controversial debates over masks, vaccinations, and basic public health data, including the number of deaths reported by states or federal governments.
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Misinformation about vaccinations took center stage earlier this year when Neil Young said he would pull his music off the music platform Spotify in protest over podcast host Joe Rogan, who had interviewed guests challenging the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
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President Biden on Wednesday revealed a new pandemic roadmap. Part of that plan will “equip Americans with tools to identify misinformation and to invest in longer-term efforts to build resilience against health misinformation.”
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In his notice to major tech platforms, Murthy is inviting specific information on demographics affected by misinformation as well as sources of misinformation and “exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to instances of COVID-19 misinformation,” according to the notice reviewed by The Times.
“Technology companies now have the opportunity to be open and transparent with the American people about the misinformation on their platforms,” Murthy said in a statement. “This is about protecting the nation’s health.”
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The source of the Coronavirus that has left more than 3 million people dead around the world is still a mystery. In recent months, the idea that it appeared from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — once dismissed as a ridiculous conspiracy theory — has gained new credence.
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How and why did this happen? For one, efforts to find a natural source of the virus have failed. Second, early steps to highlight a lab leak are often mixed with the belief that the virus was deliberately created as a bioweapon. That made it easier for many scientists to overlook the lab scenario as tin-hat nonsense. But a lack of clarity by China and continued attention to the actions of the Wuhan lab have led some scientists to say they were too quick to dismiss a potential link at first.