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Amid mounting scrutiny over its handling of coronavirus vaccine misinformation — and one week before Facebook CEO Mark ZuckerbergMark Elliot ZuckerbergHillicon Valley: Facebook to label all posts that discuss coronavirus vaccines | Swiss authorities raid home of alleged surveillance camera hacker | Study finds overlap between vaccine hesitancy and QAnon Blumenthal slams Facebook, Twitter ‘woefully inadequate’ policies on vaccine misinformation Hillicon Valley: Democrats push Facebook to ‘take responsibility’ for placement of gun accessory ads | Lawmakers introduce bill allowing Americans to take foreign hackers to court | Malala Yousafzai signs content deal with Apple MORE and other tech CEOs testify before Congress — Facebook said it will be rolling out labels for all posts discussing the vaccines. However, one senator says they’re not doing enough on anti-vaccination content.
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LABELS ABOUND: Facebook will start labeling all posts that discuss COVID-19 vaccines in an effort to combat misinformation, the company said Monday.
Facebook will initially add labels with information from the World Health Organization to posts that discuss the safety of vaccines, Facebook said in a blog post. The labels will state that vaccines go through testing for safety and efficacy before they are approved.
The social media giant said it will then roll out labels in the coming weeks for more general posts about the vaccines that will point users to information about them, and plans to add additional targeted labels with subtopics about the inoculations.
Facebook’s push comes as officials have scrutinized the platform’s handling of misinformation about the coronavirus and the vaccines.
Read more about the update.
ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES: Swiss law enforcement raided the home of a hacker potentially responsible for breaching around 150,000 surveillance cameras, exposing sensitive footage from homes, hospitals and prisons.
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A spokesperson for Switzerland’s Federal Office of Justice told The Hill on Monday that police in Lucerne, Switzerland, carried out a home search Friday at the request of the U.S. government on a residence connected to the hacker who claimed credit for the breach, declining to name those involved.
The Associated Press reported that the house belonged to a hacker known as Tillie Kottmann, and that electronics were taken from the home as part of the raid. The FBI told the publication that it was “aware of law enforcement activity carried out in Switzerland,” but had no further comment.
The raid comes a week after Bloomberg News first reported that hackers had breached security camera data from tech group Verkada, allowing access to video archives of all Verkada customers, including Tesla, Cloudflare, psychiatric hospitals, women’s clinics, schools and private residences.
Read more here.
CASTING DOUBT: Early findings from an internal study by Facebook on doubts about the coronavirus vaccine reportedly include an overlap between users expressing skepticism about vaccines and accounts affiliated with the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Facebook’s internal research is looking at posts that do not fall under its ban on vaccine misinformation but fall in more of a gray area, The Washington Post reported Sunday, citing documents on the study.
As part of the research, Facebook’s data scientists divided U.S. users, groups and pages into 638 population segments that hold vaccine hesitant beliefs, the Post reported.
Early evidence from the internal findings points to an overlap between the communities that are skeptical of vaccines and those affiliated with the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, according to the Post.
Facebook had pledged to ban all accounts affiliated with the conspiracy theory in October.
Users, however, continuously form new QAnon groups, accounts and pages using adversarial tactics that attempt to hide their affiliation with the theory, according to Facebook. As Facebook identifies the pages, they are taken down, the company says.
Read more here.
BLUMENTHAL BASHES FACEBOOK, TWITTER: Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) slammed Facebook and Twitter Monday over their handling of anti-vaccination content specifically targeting pregnant women after the platforms responded to the senator’s letter pushing them to clamp down on the misinformation campaigns.
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“Facebook and Twitter’s playbook is out-of-date, worn-out, and woefully inadequate toward addressing the horrifying abuse and disinformation that continues to spread like wildfire on their platforms,” Blumenthal said in a statement.
The senator wrote to the social media giants last month calling for them to follow through on commitments to remove coronavirus vaccine misinformation in light of reported incidents of anti-vaccine campaigns targeted and harassing pregnant women with false information.
Blumenthal said the platforms’ “vague content moderation policies, ineffective fact checking, inconsistent enforcement, and meaningless labels are cold comfort to the women continuously assailed by vile anti-vaccine hate and life-threatening falsehoods.”
Read more here.
Lighter click: Congrats on the Grammy I think
An op-ed to chew on: Cybersecurity is more critical than Biden’s rescue plan
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NOTABLE LINKS FROM AROUND THE WEB:
White House weighs new cybersecurity approach after failure to detect hacks (The New York Times / David Sanger, Julian Barnes, and Nicole Perthroth)
Amazon Expands Effort to ‘Gamify’ Warehouse Work (The Information / Paris Martineau and Mark Di Stefano)
The Climate Controversy Swirling Around NFTs (The Verge / Justine Calma)
30 current and former Mailchimp employees detail the conditions that led to a ‘mass exodus’ of women and people of color (Business Insider / Tyler Sonnemaker)
How tech workers feel about China, AI and Big Tech’s tremendous power (Protocol / Emily Birnbaum and Issie Lapowsky)
A Hacker Got All My Texts for $16 (Vice / Joseph Cox)
Social media has upped its accessibility game. But deaf creators say it has a long way to go. (The Washington Post / Rachel Lerman)