by Mary Margaret Olohan
During a press conference Monday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki dodged addressing whether the White House will reveal which Facebook posts it flags as misinformation.
Psaki said last week that the White House will flag posts deemed vaccine misinformation to Facebook. But the White House press secretary did not address Monday whether the White House will “publicly release information on posts that it considers misinformation on vaccines that it’s asked Facebook to block.”
“First of all, we have not asked Facebook to block any individual posts,” Psaki said. “The way this works is that there are trends that are out there on social media platforms. You’re aware of them, we’re aware of them. Anyone in the public can be aware of them.”
“There’s also data that we look at that many media platforms, like many of you also look at data in terms of trends and you report on it, which is to be expected, given the number of people who get their information from social media,” she said.
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“It’s up to social media platforms to determine what their application is of their own rules and regulations,” she continued. “And so we just certainly raise where we have concerns about information that’s inaccurate that is traveling out there in whatever platform it’s traveling on.”
Facebook, which did not respond to requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation, was one of several social media platforms that attempted to suppress discussion of the theory that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab. Evidence has since been uncovered suggesting the theory holds merit.
Facebook also suppressed a New York Post story in February 2020 that called the lab leak hypothesis “a possibility.” The social media platform called the post “False Information” and would not unblock the post until April 2020, the Post reported.
Twitter locked the New York Post out of its Twitter account in October after the publication published a report on emails allegedly showing that Hunter Biden and his father, then-president-elect Joe Biden, met with an executive from the Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2015.
Twitter also censored the story on its platform, prevented users from tweeting or sending the link, and locked the accounts of a number of high-profile Twitter users, such as former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who attempted to post the link.
Both Facebook and Twitter also repeatedly censored former President Donald Trump’s tweets and posts during the 2020 presidential election.
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Mary Margaret Olohan is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
