President Biden on Monday explained that he wasn't being literal when he said Friday that Facebook and other social media companies were "killing people" by allowing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation to spread online.
Facebook pushed back against the criticism over the weekend, and during a Monday press conference Biden clarified that it wasn't Facebook, but a handful of the site's users who are putting people at risk by posting false information about the COVID-19 shots. Still, he didn't necessarily let the company off the hook. "My hope is that Facebook — instead of taking it personally that somehow I'm saying Facebook is killing people — that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine," he told reporters. "That's what I meant."
Later, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki added that the Biden administration is not "in a war or battle with Facebook." The war, she said, was with the coronavirus itself.
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