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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On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo met with Wang Wentao, the Chinese Commerce Minister, in Washington. It marked the first cabinet-level meeting in Washington between the U.S. and China during the Biden administration, and it was a signal of the Commerce Department’s increasingly central role in the current U.S.-China relationship. Usually, the Commerce Department is far from the center of anything, but as Katrina Northrop reports, the department is uniquely suited to address the China challenge.
The lawyer and author talks about the attack on a train in the 1920s which created an international incident, the rise of the Communist Party and the conditions for foreign media in China today.
