Tag: health misinformation

Rat Out Your Doctor: Biden’s Surgeon General Calls on Informants to Report Use of Generic Drugs

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Rat Out Your Doctor: Biden’s Surgeon General Calls on Informants to Report Use of Generic Drugs

The purpose of the RFI is described as being to help the authorities understand the effect of pandemic “misinformation” on such areas as “health decisions and outcomes, direct and indirect costs, trust in the healthcare system and providers, and healthcare worker morale and safety. It is also intended to help them ascertain its impact on “access to trusted and credible health information, particularly during a public health emergency” and on “lifesaving health decisions such as an individual’s likelihood to vaccinate, and to “prepare for and respond to future public health crises.”

The RFI, which covers a period extending from January 2020 to the present, applies to general search engines, content sharing platforms, social media platforms, e-commerce platforms, crowd-sourced platforms, and instant messaging systems, and includes “research, case studies, data sets, images, data visualizations, interviews, and personal testimonies.”

The Internet Is Not Facebook; Regulating It As If It Were Will Fuck Things Up

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

The Internet Is Not Facebook; Regulating It As If It Were Will Fuck Things Up

There’s only one problem: What is health misinformation? I know of no oracular source of truth about Covid-19. Scientific consensus has shifted dramatically during the pandemic, and even now experts are divided over important issues, such as whether everyone should get a vaccine booster shot. Klobuchar and Luján’s bill elides these complications. Instead they designate an all-knowing authority: Health misinformation, the bill says, is whatever the secretary of health and human services decides is health misinformation.

Surgeon general calls out platforms over COVID-19 misinformation

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Surgeon general calls out platforms over COVID-19 misinformation

The report calls for an all-of-society push to address vaccine and coronavirus misinformation, including sweeping policy recommendations for companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy specifically calls on companies to redesign their algorithms to “avoid amplifying misinformation.” He also suggests that they build more “friction” into sharing functions that urge users to rethink whether to share a post containing false information.

Murthy also recommends that platforms put out “clear consequences for accounts that repeatedly violate platform policies,” like instituting broader bans and suspensions for sharing misinformation.

Previously:

White House ‘Flagging’ COVID ‘Disinformation’ for Social Media Companies

Trump did similar but I don’t remember any outrage. I didn’t even know about it, until I read this on TechDirt (the author claims that the current administration is only complaining, not demanding). I don’t see it that way, though, and feel there’s no difference; it’s fascism!