Last Friday afternoon, just as President Joe Biden was boarding Marine One for a weekend at Camp David, a reporter yelled out a question: “On Covid misinformation, what is your message to platforms like Facebook?” Above the din of the helicopter, Biden responded with his quintessential frankness: “They’re killing people.”
His comment didn’t come out of nowhere. Just the day before, the Surgeon General, in his first formal advisory of the Biden administration, issued a stark warning about Covid-19 related misinformation, specifically calling out social media companies for providing a platform for the dangerous inaccuracies. Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, has named Facebook as a major source of anti-vaccine fear-mongering. And on the same day that Biden headed for Camp David, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, made a point of saying that Facebook should be doing more, especially because some of the misleading information comes from two of America’s biggest
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Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative under Donald Trump, reflects on his decision to launch the trade war with China and begin the process of "strategic decoupling" — a process he says the U.S. must see through to the end.
