Bulletins

WHO enlists Facebook, Google to fight coronavirus fake news

Lauren Hepler
February 14, 2020

Can some of the world's biggest tech companies work together to devise a plan to rein in misinformation about the coronavirus? The World Health Organization hopes so.

The agency convened about a dozen large tech companies at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters on Thursday — among them Google, Amazon, YouTube and Airbnb — to "work together on solutions to the coronavirus," CNBC reports. Shoddy information about the virus emerged as an initial focus, but the group plans to convene every few months. The holdouts who were invited but didn't attend? Apple, Uber and Lyft.

Lauren Hepler

Lauren Hepler ( @lahepler) is a former reporter for Protocol covering how people live and work in Silicon Valley. She previously covered development, energy, and tech for The New York Times, The Guardian, the LA Times, the Silicon Valley Business Journal, and others. Lauren can be reached at lhepler@protocol.com (just ask for Signal), and you can share information with her anonymously via Protocol's SecureDrop. She grew up in Ohio and lives in Oakland.

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