UK POLITICS
The government should bring forward emergency legislation to “stamp out” dangerous anti-vax misinformation ahead of the roll-out of the Covid-19 vaccine, Labour has said.
The shadow culture secretary, Jo Stevens, and the shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, have written to the government warning that “our historic strength in vaccine uptake must not be taken for granted” as the prospect of a treatment for the virus looms.
Keir Starmer’s shadow ministers are calling for financial and criminal penalties for social media companies that fail to censor posts promoting anti-vaccination content, which they note is rampant on those platforms.
The opposition ministers say anti-vaccination groups with almost 100,000 users can be found within seconds of logging on to Facebook.An analysis by a think tank, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, suggests that misinformation and disinformation about vaccines is also spreading on newer forms of social media, such as TikTok, where the hashtag #vaccinesaredangerous has almost 800,000 views.Last week, social media giants agreed a package of measures with ministers to tackle anti-vaccine misinformation. Facebook, Twitter and Google promised to “step up work with public health bodies to promote factual and reliable messages” and committed to “swifter responses to flagged content”.
The digital secretary, Oliver Dowden, said that “Covid disinformation is dangerous and could cost lives”, and that there was "much more that can be done" to counter it.
However, the government has stopped short of saying such misinformation should necessarily be removed, instead raising the prospect that it could instead be de-monetised, given that “making money from this dangerous content would be wrong”.
Imran Ahmed, a former Labour adviser who runs the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, said: “Despite big tech's promises, Google is still funding anti-vax misinformation websites by placing advertisements on them, while Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube give well-known anti-vaxxers a platform to spread dangerous conspiracy theories and lies to millions of users.
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