White House turns up heat on Big Tech’s Covid ‘disinformation dozen’

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.

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