WASHINGTON — In March, Andy Slavitt, then a top pandemic adviser for President Biden, called Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs, and delivered an ominous warning.
For many weeks, Mr. Slavitt and other White House officials had been meeting with Facebook to urge the company to stop the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus vaccines. Many Americans who refused to get vaccinated had cited false stories they read on Facebook, including theories that the shots could lead to infertility, stillborn babies and autism. Mr. Slavitt and other officials felt that executives were deflecting blame and resisting requests for information.
“In eight weeks’ time,” Mr. Slavitt told Mr. Clegg, “Facebook will be the No. 1 story of the pandemic.”
Mr. Slavitt’s prediction was not far off. Roughly three months later, with cases from the Delta variant surging, Mr. Biden said Facebook was “killing people” — a comment that put the social network in the center of the public discussion about the virus.
Mr. Biden’s comment, which he later walked back slightly, was the culmination of increasingly combative meetings with the company about the spread of misinformation. Interviews with administration officials, Facebook employees and other people with knowledge of the internal discussions revealed new details about who took part in the talks and the issues that fed the frustrations between the White House and the Silicon Valley titan.
The meetings have involved the top ranks on both sides, according to the people, including those close to Facebook and those with ties to the administration, who would only speak anonymously because the conversations were private. In March, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, called Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, and discussed health misinformation. The White House grew so frustrated by Facebook’s answers in the internal meetings that at one point it demanded to hear from the data scientists at the company instead of lobbyists. And the nation’s top doctor presented the social media representatives with anecdotes from doctors and nurses who had interacted with Covid-19 patients who believed incorrect information.
Talks between the White House and Facebook continue. But the rift has complicated an already tumultuous relationship just as Mr. Biden faces a setback on fighting the coronavirus. The White House missed its goal of having 70 percent of American adults with at least one vaccination shot by July 4, and the highly contagious Delta variant has fueled a rise in cases since then. The United States averaged more than 110,000 new daily cases in the past week, up from about 13,000 a month ago. In response, the administration has reversed some public health advice, leaving many Americans perplexed over requirements like wearing masks.
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The vast majority of the new cases are among unvaccinated people. On Thursday, the White House urged pediatricians to incorporate vaccination into back-to-school sports physicals and encouraged schools to host their own vaccination clinics. But close collaboration with Facebook, by far the largest social network in the country, could be crucial to overcoming the widespread vaccine hesitancy and ultimately the pandemic.
“We’ve engaged with Facebook since the transition on this issue,” said Mike Gwin, a White House spokesman, “and we’ve made clear to them when they haven’t lived up to our, or their own, standards and have actively elevated content on their platforms that misleads the American people.”
Facebook has pushed back strongly against the White House’s criticism, accusing the administration in public of scapegoating the company for the administration’s failure to reach its vaccination goals. Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook, said the White House hadn’t given the company enough credit for promoting the vaccine. He said the social network had been working with the White House for “many months” to get people vaccinated, introducing features like prominent links to vaccine clinics.
“We remove Covid-related content that breaks our rules and continue to link to authoritative health information on all Covid-related posts,” Mr. Stone said.
Mr. Gwin said the administration needed the help of not just Facebook but also other tech platforms, elected leaders and media outlets to spread accurate information about the vaccine. But aggressively condemning prominent TV personalities on certain outlets, such as Fox News, could risk alienating some viewers and making them less likely to get vaccinated, administration officials say.
The White House believes that Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, emerged as particularly problematic, some people close to the administration said. Human rights advocates and election officials have had similar complaints about the company’s handling of misinformation in recent years, saying executives point to steps taken to share factual information but avoid responsibility for the falsehoods spread widely on its services.
Mr. Biden’s frustrations with Facebook began before the pandemic. His team sparred with the company during his presidential campaign over its decision not to fact-check political ads, especially after groups supporting Donald J. Trump ran ads with false claims about Mr. Biden’s interactions with Ukrainian officials. At one point during the campaign, Mr. Biden described the company’s chief executive as a “real problem,” and added that “I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan.”
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After the election, Mr. Biden’s transition team set up meetings with numerous organizations about Covid-19 misinformation, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest, as well as Fox News and CNN.
The meetings, which began in December, were attended by Dr. Vivek Murthy, who would later be named the surgeon general; D.J. Patil, the chief technology officer for Mr. Biden’s transition team; and Rob Flaherty, Mr. Biden’s director of digital strategy. They said they wanted to ensure that people hesitant about getting the vaccine received accurate information about the shots.
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The officials asked the tech companies to prevent false statements about the virus from circulating. The officials also asked the companies how many “fence sitters,” people hesitant about getting vaccinated, were exposed to misinformation on their sites.
Over the next weeks, many of the social media companies struggled to eradicate health misinformation. But some shared information the White House sought.
YouTube presented data showing that about 16 out of 10,000 views violated its content rules, although it didn’t specify how much video content was related to Covid-19 misinformation. Twitter said it had opened its data for researchers and academics to study the spread of misinformation on the site, and shared with the White House that it had created a “strikes” system to better police accounts that spread the most Covid misinformation.
