Psaki says administration is working with Facebook to limit misinformation

Jen Psaki said the White House's relationship with Big Tech 'shouldn't come as any surprise'

White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the Biden administration working with Facebook to limit misinformation on the coronavirus vaccine. 

"So we're regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives, dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing across all of social and traditional media. And we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies," Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Friday during a press conference. 

"As you all know information travels quite quickly. If it's up there for days and days and days, when people see it, you know, there's, it's hard to put that back in a box, and of course promoting quality information algorithms, I don't know how they work, but they all do know how they work," Psaki continued. 

Paski also remarked that if a user is banned from one platform "for providing misinformation" that user should be banned from all others. 

Fox News’s Peter Doocy pressed the press secretary over the administration’s relationship with Facebook, with Psaki saying that the White House doesn’t block anything on the platform. 

"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. Our point is that there is information that is leading to people not taking the vaccine," Psaki said. 

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The White House said on Thursday that 12 people are behind the majority of misinformation on social media, which led to a question Friday concerning "how long the administration has been spying on people's Facebook profiles."

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Psaki dodged the question, calling it "inaccurate" and said the administration works closely with media reporters just as it does with tech companies. 

The press conference comes after Facebook previously blocked a theory from its site that the coronavirus was leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan. It was overwhelmingly passed off as a "conspiracy theory" last year but has found renewed interest in 2021, with President Joe Biden ordering a review of the theory and the World Health Organization acknowledging it was premature to discount the idea. 

Critics have slammed the Biden administration for their relationship with Big Tech over misinformation what they described as government overreach. 

"Psaki says the White House has been flagging ‘problematic posts’ on Facebook they believe are misinformation about Wuhan coronavirus. Reminder: Fauci worked with Facebook to ban the lab leak theory, which is factual, for more than a year," Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich tweeted. 

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"Being anti-vaccine is part of free speech. @PressSec is against freedom," Media Research Center's Dan Gainor tweeted.