Opinion: Fighting vaccine disinformation is crucial to ending the pandemic
CNNEditor’s Note: Ann M. Ravel is the Digital Deception Project director at MapLight and previously served as chair of the Federal Election Commission. According to its policy, YouTube prohibits “content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s medical information about COVID-19.” While these short suspensions are grabbing headlines, they’re also obscuring the larger problem that major social media companies are utterly failing to prevent disinformation from spreading rampantly and wreaking havoc on public health. Here’s what these companies should do: Enhance monitoring of high-reach accounts Anyone with more than 50,000 followers — that is, a person that we’ve determined has “high reach” on social media — and a history of sharing disinformation about Covid-19 should have their posts subjected to a pre-clearance policy in which the content can be fact-checked before it’s posted online and damage has already been done. Every month, social media companies are asked to report to the European Commission how they’re working to address Covid-19 disinformation. There isn’t a silver bullet to eliminate the Covid-19 disinformation that has become so prominent online, so we need social media companies and our government to do everything they can to chip away at the problem.