Sources: the White House sought help from Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and others to combat COVID-19 misinformation and track its spread
The Trump administration implored the companies to use their technical expertise to help those dealing directly with the fallout of coronavirus.
PoliticoSteven Overly
Context & Ripple Effects
The request came one day after the White House's March 11 meeting with Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and others, and it landed on companies that had already moved publicly: the day before this report, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube announced joint work with healthcare agencies on COVID-19 misinformation. Within a week, the government was also in talks with Facebook and Google over using Americans' smartphone location data to track the outbreak.
The arc that followed shows the friction baked into the arrangement: by late May, the COVID-19 Technology Task Force was reportedly bogged down in privacy disputes, and by mid-2021 the relationship had hardened from asking for help to the White House directly alerting Facebook about posts it deemed misinformation — with the surgeon general formally pressing platforms on health misinformation.
First-order effects
Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are being asked to act as public-health infrastructure in real time — moderating health claims and supplying technical expertise to officials dealing with the outbreak's fallout.
The platforms' existing joint commitment with healthcare agencies gives the White House a ready-made channel: the coordination it is requesting is already partially operational across the industry.
Second-order effects
Expanding the collaboration toward smartphone location data pulls Facebook, Google and their peers into direct conflict with privacy expectations, a tension that later stalled the COVID-19 Technology Task Force itself.
The joint industry statement raises the bar for every platform not named — any social network that stays outside the healthcare-agency coalition now looks like the outlier on pandemic misinformation.
Third-order effects
The pattern points toward a standing government-platform relationship on content: from requesting help in March 2020 to flagging specific posts by mid-2021, the White House moved from supplicant to active participant in platform moderation — a shift that sets up lasting disputes over speech, privacy, and who arbitrates health claims.
If crisis-era data sharing normalizes, the privacy disagreements that stalled the task force become the template battleground for any future government request for platform data, not a one-off.
The trend: Crises are converting the major platforms into quasi-governmental information infrastructure, with each successive White House request deepening the entanglement and sharpening the privacy and speech conflicts that follow it.
NEW: White House asks Silicon Valley for help to combat coronavirus, track its spread and stop misinformation. Meeting today with FB, Google, IBM, Microsoft and major tech companies could set stage for more collaboration. I spoke with people in the room. https://www.washingtonpos…
Is there anyone else who thinks this isn't going to end well? It's not like they have an agenda for world domination and population control or anything crazy like that! https://www.breitbart.com/...
So our government is asking the largest purveyors of misinformation ever to exist on this planet to fix their misinformation problem about Coronavirus. Welcome to the Leopards Eating Faces Party. https://twitter.com/...
Oh, now @realdonaldtrump wants Amazon help. It's the problem with always being mean to people. Inevitably you need something. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
The Trump admin is calling on Silicon Valley to censor more!? Virus misinformation seems like an almost entirely made up problem so far, excepting Trump's own stupid comments and the media originally playing it down. https://twitter.com/...
rough guess is that the tech community gets together [virtually] to propose a solution to the pandemic that is mostly just a public health rebranding of existing surveillance technologies
We have developed an app that lets you put your face on the coronavirus, but only if you give it permission to access all your social media data. The ad-free version costs $5.99. https://twitter.com/...
Today, @USCTO Kratsios convened a meeting with representatives from American technology companies and Federal agencies to discuss tech-related COVID-19 response efforts and opportunities for collaboration. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Two issues with this. 1. Significant coronavirus misinformation seems to be coming *from* the White House. 2. This is happening at the same time as the administration is trying to hammer social media companies for over-censoring content. https://twitter.com/...
TechCos not only couldn't stop misinformation before coronavirus, it actively pushed back against trying to do so (because it is an impossible problem at platform scale) Coronavirus changes absolutely nothing about this, no matter how many meetings CEOs have with POTUS https://tw…
i'm very excited for the tech leaders to offer to use their advertising profits to cut ppl checks to build a social safety net (that's what's happening right? definitely that and not some kind of virus news tracker dashboard? right?) https://twitter.com/...
Updated — with more on what tech companies are doing and WH comment, as officials say it's the first of multiple meetings to come https://twitter.com/...