White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration is reviewing Facebook posts for “misinformation.”
Psaki said in a press conference the White House is actively searching for “misinformation” or posts considered “problematic,” without providing any definition of what the Biden administration considers unacceptable.
Psaki told reporters the White House is in regular contact with social media executives, The Washington Times reports.
The White House is asking Facebook to disclose the reach and engagement of any post they deem of concern, The Daily Caller reports.
Facebook was one of the social media sites that censored information on the origin of the COVID virus. Any post related to a possible origin in the Wuhan lab was concealed.
The Biden administration is asking social media companies to measure and report the amount of “misinformation” on their platforms and provide an enforcement strategy and quick action against rule violations or “harmful posts.” The White House says it expects social media companies to promote “quality information” throughout their platforms.
“Facebook has repeatedly shown that they have the levers to promote quality information,” Psaki said. “We have seen them effectively do this in their algorithm over low-quality information, and they’ve chosen not to use it in this case and that is certainly an area that would have an impact.”
Social media sites have already been actively censoring content. Twitter and Facebook censored former President Donald Trump and his press secretary Kayleigh McEnany during the 2020 presidential campaign.
Psaki may have inadvertently brought conservatives and others on the political Right together to combat censorship, writes columnist Philip Klein at National Review. Until now, the Right has been largely divided on the subject.
“The issue has pit MAGA-friendly conservatives, who are eager to wield government power to get the outcomes they want, and traditional small-government conservatives, who are reticent to target private companies for making decisions about how they run their businesses,” Klein writes. “My guess is that Psaki’s comments will nudge more conservatives closer to the MAGA position of going after Big Tech if they were not already there.”