“This represents a broader trend that extends beyond the past two years in which the rapid adoption of most of these sites and apps seen in the last decade has slowed,” Pew says. According to Pew, the only other platform to see “statistically significant” growth since 2019 was Reddit, which grew from 11 percent in 2019 to 18 percent in 2021. “Facebook’s growth has leveled off over the last five years, but it remains one of the most widely used social media sites among adults in the United States,” Pew writes in its report.įlat growth wasn’t unique to just Facebook, either. Facebook’s numbers, meanwhile, remained unchanged from 2019 at 69 percent. But of the two, only YouTube is still growing, increasing its share of users from 73 percent of adults in 2019, to 81 percent in 2021. That’s one of the major findings of a new report on how Americans use social media from the Pew Research Center.Īccording to the report, YouTube and Facebook are the most widely used platforms. "That calls any solutions they have into question.YouTube and Facebook are still the most dominant social media platforms in the United States, but Facebook is no longer growing. The Biden administration's broad concern is that the platforms are "either lying to us and hiding the ball, or they're not taking it seriously and there isn't a deep analysis of what's going on in their platforms," the official said. YouTube only grants Content ID to copyright owners who meet specific criteria. In a separate blog post last Saturday, Facebook called on the administration to stop "finger-pointing," laying out the steps it had taken to encourage users to get vaccinated.īut the administration official said the blog post did not have any metrics of success. The official said the answers Facebook has given are not "good enough."įacebook spokesman Kevin McAlister said the company has removed over 18 million pieces of COVID-19 misinformation since the start of the pandemic and that its own data shows that for people in the United States using the platform, vaccine hesitancy has declined by 50% since January and vaccine acceptance is high. These include how much vaccine misinformation exists on its platform, who is seeing the inaccurate claims, what the company is doing to reach out to them and how does Facebook know the steps it is taking are working. The senior administration official cited four issues on which the administration has asked Facebook to provide specific data, but the company has been reticent to comply. On Monday, YouTube also said it will add more credible health information and as well as tabs for viewers to click on. "If any remaining channels mentioned in the report violate our policies, we will take action, including permanent terminations," she said. She said the company's policies are based on the content of the video, rather than the speaker. YouTube spokeswoman Elena Hernandez said that since March 2020, the company has removed over 900,000 videos containing COVID-19 misinformation and terminated YouTube channels of people identified in the CCDH report. but Google has a lot to answer for and somehow manages to get away with it always because people forget they own YouTube," said Imran Ahmed, CCDH founder and chief executive. "Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla in the room when it comes to vaccine misinformation.
The requests to Facebook and YouTube come after the White House reached out to Facebook, Twitter (TWTR.N) and Google in February about clamping down on COVID misinformation, seeking their help to stop it from going viral, another senior administration official said then. The fight against vaccine misinformation has become a top priority for the Biden administration at a time when the pace of vaccinations has slowed considerably despite the risk posed by the Delta variant, with people in many parts of the country hostile to being vaccinated. "We would like to see more done by everybody" to limit the spread of inaccurate information from those accounts, the official said. Six of those accounts are still posting on YouTube. Social media companies have come under fire recently from Biden, his press secretary, Jen Psaki, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who have all said the spread of lies about vaccines is making it harder to fight the pandemic and save lives.Ī recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which has also been highlighted by the White House, showed 12 anti-vaccine accounts are spreading nearly two-thirds of anti-vaccine misinformation online.
Some of the main pieces of vaccine misinformation the Biden administration is fighting include that the COVID-19 vaccines are ineffective, false claims that they carry microchips and that they hurt women's fertility, the official said. are the judge, the jury and the executioner when it comes to what is going on in their platforms," an administration official said, describing their approach to COVID misinformation.
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