US Democratic Representative Adam Schiff referred to as on Facebook and Amazon.com Inc on Thursday to supply a extra thorough rationalization of their efforts to mitigate the unfold of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.

“Despite some concrete and positive steps previously taken, these companies owe both the public and the Congress additional answers about the exponential and dangerous proliferation of misinformation,” Schiff, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, stated in a press release after sending letters to the businesses.

US know-how firms have come beneath hearth from the Biden administration and different critics for the alarming unfold of vaccine misinformation that they are saying is slowing inoculation within the nation and rising hostility to vaccines.

Other firms, together with Twitter and Alphabet’s Google and YouTube, have additionally confronted criticism for permitting false data on COVID-19, together with vaccines, to proliferate.

An Amazon spokesperson stated the corporate is “constantly evaluating the books we list to ensure they comply with our content guidelines, and as an additional service to customers, at the top of relevant search results pages we link to the CDC advice on COVID and protection measures.”

Facebook stated in a press release that because the begin of the pandemic it had “removed over 20 million pieces of COVID misinformation, labeled more than 190 million pieces of COVID content rated by our fact-checking partners, and connected over 2 billion people with reliable information through tools like our COVID information centre.”

The firm added it had “removed over 3,000 accounts, pages, and groups for repeatedly violating our COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation policies and will continue to enforce our policies and offer tools and reminders for people who use our platform to get vaccinated.”

Facebook stated final month it had eliminated dozens of vaccine misinformation “superspreaders.”

© Thomson Reuters 2021