WHO: Interview with Andy Pattison

How the WHO is Working With Social Media Platforms

We interviewed Andy Pattison, from the World Health Organization, the UN agency for health, to discuss the question of social media platforms and how they have to step-up to their monitoring and be responsible corporate citizens in the fight to keep misinformation, disinformation, and fake news from spreading like wildfire.

While social media advertising and citizens sharing information does not replace the work of professional journalists - work that is objective, accurate and has an ethical responsibility to readers and audiences - the unchecked power of social media platforms and social advertising is a new reality in the current information landscape that we are living in, since Facebook sprung from a college dorm room as an undergraduate experiment on rating people based on their looks, in 2003.

If left unchecked social media platforms have serious consequences for public health, as they have for democracy, elections, and public discourse. Our lives literally depend on social media…