Next, a look at scams, profiteering and conspiracy theories from the coronavirus pandemic. Medical experts, victims of disinformation campaigns and legislatures from both the u. S. And canada discuss the challenges they are facing. Hosted by George WashingtonUniversities Institute for data, democracy and politics on tuesday. This is an hour and ten minutes. Welcome to our continuing conversation about the flaws of big social media platforms in response to the disinformation campaigns around covid19 pandemic, a very serious situation, obviously, where lives are literally in the balance. Im frank sesno affiliated with the institute of data and democracy in politics which is presenting this event together with the International Grand committee on disinformation. I will be your moderator and your timekeeper. I will continue this conversation with our distinguished panelists and guests. If you are a journalist joining us, feel free to put your question into the q a field. I will try to incorporate any of those questions to our panel in a bit. Social media platforms as we know, as we have discussed, are allowing unscrupulous actors to sell unsafe, illegal and overpriced medical equipment during this pandemic. That is one of many issues that we see across the social media platforms. This one is not a new problem. Social media platforms continue to allow these dangerous disinformation during covid pandemic. And so doing, they exposed just how dangerous and how irresponsible this kind of behavior can be and the role they play and continuing to allow it. Rampant conspiracy theories make the situation worse. Confusing people. Distracting people. Social media platforms have the technological know how and resources to fix it, that they have little kids incentive to do so. Weve got a distinguished panel to discuss these problems. We go on the front lines who deal with these issues directly and legislators who are trying to do something about it from two countries. First we will look at some of the issues and mistakes to launch this conversation. Big masks advertised on facebook by Big Companies telling the masks can filter out 99 of harmful particles. Heres what you pay for it and heres what you get. This is a counterfeit product scam. We knew we needed masks because we are responsible for overseeing these children, the health of these children, the welfare of these children. You warning from the fbi about coronavirus scams. I noticed an ad for a mask on facebook. I saw facebook as a legitimate company, so i ordered my mask on april 3rd and got the confirmation that they received my payment. Scams are on the ride with the increasing needs for these protective supplies. My initial auto reply from facebook ive got nothing from them. I absolutely thought about the fact that without these masks coming, that it put these children and their families and our organization at highrisk. I u. S. Lawmakers who are joining us. They are charged with Consumer Protection. Conspiracy theories around the coronavirus is called caused by my apologies for that video there. There was a technological glitch in trying to connect the world via skype. This is a learning process for all of us. Again, my apologies. Let me try this again. We have to leading u. S. Lawmakers who are charged for Consumer Protection in the United States congress and another another from canada who is also a leader in disinformation. Senator Richard Blumenthal joins us for consumer rights. And kinetic gets to attorney general. Senator blumenthal, its a great pleasure. The states attorney general and his work in the senate on the commerce judicial committee. I recognized leader in the senate. Congress woman schakowsky, from the great state of illinois. She shares the Consumer Protection subcommittee. You served as the Senior Deputy in the house leadership as well. Thanks to you for joining us. Were also joined by nathanael smith, i canadian member of parliament. He is on the Standing Committee on industry science and technology. He has been demanding action on this information for quite some time. I will ask our lawmakers to bear with me and allow me the time keeper role here. As i turn to our witnesses who are experiencing this disinformation firsthand. Randi smith is a mentor to rescue in round rock texas after a successful corporate career. He has become a house parent as you saw on that video. Mentoring a foster home. He is the kind of Community Leader leader as we seen this video that we would all like to have. We thank you and celebrate you and appreciate everything you are doing. Doctor stokes, an assistant professor at mount sinai icon school of medicine and a fellow at Johns Hopkins center for health and security and bio security. Shes a clinical attending physician treating patients at mount sinai, also serving at mount sinai covid19 best practices committee. Let us get a sense of what is going on with you out there in the world, and then bring that to our elected representatives for for the conversation. Randi smith, let us start with you. Go ahead and share your story. We saw you expressing your experiences and frustration, and the stakes of what this is all about. Go ahead, the floor is yours. Thank you, frank. When this pandemic happened we became concerned about our ability to serve and support the teams that were in our program. We mediately started looking at the need of the teams but as well the logistics of complying with the social distancing guidelines. We knew we would need to perform well, tutoring, rights to work. What we quickly realized as we were also going to be responsible for supplying food and other supplies to many of the families. Initially, when i found the masks, i found them on amazon but they were only the dust masks. Local stores were out so i followed a link to masks that were advertised on facebook. Knowing that facebook is a legitimate company, i assumed that they only allow legitimate advertisers, so i went ahead, purchased the mask from zest ads through facebook. Certainly later i received and an accurate order confirmation from zest ads which let me know that something was wrong. And looking into that i found a Facebook Group with over 1000 members most of whom had ordered from zest ads. By this time hundreds had posted information regarding the dispute on facebook and paypal, but it was very difficult to find anyone posting resolutions to those concerns. It was in just face masks. Hundreds had ordered these robotic robotic vacuums, drones and had become victims of the scam. It was apparent that facebook had been aware of this for several weeks. There were no secrets. People were getting ripped off. I imagine that one person that reported, there might have been hundreds that did not speak up per se anything. When i look at it, if i walk into a home depot store, there is a responsibility to make sure that i receive what i was sold. There is also regulation to protect my electronic funds. The platform of selling online needs to be held to a higher standard. The fact is, there often representing a company that does not have a historic. There is a seller that may not be based, maybe based outside of the United States, so consumers are powerless and confronting them. We cannot walk in and speak to the returns counter. It is easy to get ripped off. I think allowing this fraudulent practice to continue will only cause consumers to be more cautious about buying online. That is going to be at the expense of smaller Reputable Companies that rely on that platform to promote and sell their products. In the grand scheme of things, 200 dollars may not seem like a lot of money, but regardless of the amount, it is another persons precious dollars. For someone like me, a Non Profit Organization who serves in housing the youth on essential donated dollars, every dollar is absolutely vital. Let me say a couple of things. First of all, you say 200 dollars is not very much. One person, multiply it times 1 million, we are talking serious dollars. It is major, major fraud cast over a lot of people. I think this is very important. Your story is known and got told properly because of the incredible work at craig solomon and buzzfeed. Along with our institute of data democracy and politics. As they started looking into some of these, this proliferation of social media and emails, or billion emails wrapped around some of the things that they found. They found your story. I think part of what is so important is exposing these things so thank you for showing your story with them, so that it could be reported and thank you for sharing your story with us right now. We will come back to you. Doctor stokes, i want to turn it over to you for your perspective. Thank you. As an emergency physician in new york city, i have managed more than 100 cases of covid19, but i have lost count of how many people were exposed, not to the virus itself, but disinformation about the virus on social media. It is hurting my patients. One of my first cases at the beginning of march was an elderly woman walked in by her adult son. She had fever, cough, fatigue. Her heart rate was high and oxygen low. When i told her son the news, he did not believe me. He did not believe the virus even existed. He actually showed me his facebook and there was a post that said something like, covid19 is a hoax. It is made up by Drug Companies to sell vaccines. That same week, another patient was brought in by her daughter. Same symptoms, same diagnosis. But her daughter insisted to me that there was no way her mother could have the virus because she got off facebook that covid19 was prevented by antibiotics and vitamins. So she went to her Neighborhood Store and picked up these pills for her mother and theyve been taking that every day. There was no way her mother could have covid19. Ive had so many of these conversations since the beginning of the outbreak. After everything we have been through over these past three months, i am still having these conversations. Most recently on my shift, just last week. When i talked to patients and their families about the facts of covid19, they are understandably confused and scared, because theyve already been exposed to so much conflicting information. They do not know it is real or what isnt. The common reaction is to get angry and ask, how is it possible for a patient to have covid19 . They will say things like, my mother no never left the house. Shes not been in contact with anyone except for us. And we are all healthy. They dont make the connection that even though they themselves are healthy and have no symptoms, they can still have the virus and they can still pass it on. Eventually, after we talked, it starts to sink in. One of the things i will never forget is that look on someones face when all of a sudden, they realize they are the one. They are the one that likely have the veer virus and likely pass it on to their loved ones. I have seen that look so many times. It is something i will remember for the rest of my life. I have been told that the way to counter act disinformation is to put out good information. But social media is so fast i cannot keep up. In the middle of a pandemic, which is not enough time, we are fighting just to keep our patients alive on the front lines. We should not be fighting this war with information at the same time. It is not possible. We are trained to handle emergency situations. We are not trained for this. We need help. Thank you for listening. Wow. Doctor stokes, thank you very much. Not only are you not trained for this, you should not have to spend your time talking about disinformation. You should be treating patients. I want to ask you one question before going to senator blumenthal. The stories that you tell are really disturbing and very shocking, of patients who think that they can get a pill or take a pill and they will be immune from it down the corner. And all these other examples you gave. Are these and this is not scientific, this is just anecdotal through your experience that im asking. Are these rare cases, doctor stokes . Are these coming from 10 , 20 , half of the people . Give us a sense from your lived experience, how prevalent is this miss this disinformation, what you hear from patience. I would say, the overwhelming majority, just to give you a sense of this, at the beginning of the outbreak, some of the people who were actually looking at some of the information and questioning it or actual doctors. One of the things i do at mount sinai is look at the literature and make sure that we are following best practices. I dont think we do not understand what it was like in the beginning of february and march. We did not have enough information. I hate to say it, but i had colleagues of mine who would fall for some of these hoaxes that we read on facebook. Now it is much more clear, but if we are having people from the medical community who were not able to necessarily identify false information from good information, what can we expect from patience and do not know how it is possible. How can we sift that information and make decisions for their health that are based on actual, good information . Thank you, doctor stokes. Senator blumenthal, let me turn to you. You have taken on Health Insurance industries, big tobacco. Youve been an outspoken advocate for consumer rights. In this case, consumers as we just heard from doctor stokes, are getting huge amounts of Bad Information throughout social media platforms. The scammers who are selling useless pills like this. Leading people to think that now they are immune. Conspiracy theories that drive people and all sorts of different directions. Lets turn it over to you. Respond to what you have heard from doctor stokes and randy smith. What should be done about it . Awesome your muted, senator blumenthal. Can you and mutual self . Still muted. There we go. Thank you for joining us. Let me just repeat my thanks even more enthusiastically to you. To grant to randy smith and doctor stokes who so compellingly described some of the real harm that results from this this information and to my colleague, again schakowsky, thank you for being a steadfast warrior on behalf of consumers. I will tell you my reaction as i listen to the stories from the real world. I see them every day. I am so angry. And really, just outraged. I know we use that word a lot, but when you hear not only the threat to pocketbooks, as randy smith said, its only 200 dollars. 200 dollars here, 200 dollars there, were talking about a lot of money eventually. I was involved in class actions involving a lot less than 200 dollars. But with doctor stokes said so compellingly is that there is a real threat to human life and safety. So, big tech, which can be a great boom also can be the pain of our lives, a real threat, when they convey this information, and too often, they are complicit. I use that word very deliberately. They are complicit, aiding and abetting the spread with deceptive and misleading ads that can do grave harm to people and threaten. I will give you one or two examples that are particularly out of bounds across the line, where big tech has an obligation egg we are releasing a letter today. Were saying to the ftc that it should be taking action against the frauds and scams around the stimulus payment that are being issued by the federal government, all too often, people who are eligible for these stimulus payments are not receiving them. Due to lacking efforts. Now that we are discovering, people who go to google and counter, malware and fraudulent schemes and referrals. Google does or should know, our scams. We are asking the ftc to take action, not only against the advertisers or the con artists, but also against google, because it has taken action and the past against advertisers that engage in enabling frauds to mislead ordinary people. You mentioned exposing these frauds. Well, exposing them is very, very important, but enforcing against them is an obligation of the ftc and the federal communications commissions. They have a real responsibility. You mentioned faith cures. Absolutely astonishing. By the way, the projects that we are doing, the letter, is the result of the tech champ transparency project. But likewise, on faith here science of Public Interest has released 46 separate false cures. Dietary supplements, chemicals. There is no vaccine, as you know for covid19. There is no there pewter treatments, and certainly none of these are. Ive written to the ftc about that. Just to be clear. Hes 46 fake cures are being promoted and represented as cures . The platforms are doing or saying nothing to pull them down, to identify them, to expose that . Nothing on their own until we wrote to the ftc. Now they are down, but there are more on their plate. If you go to your key point, the platforms are failing to act against them on their own until they are ordered to do so by the ftc, and of course the ftc is limited in terms of its resources but also in the past it has lacked the will to do effective enforcement. We are also on the subject en masse, amazon, ebay, to ask them to stop selling masks that are in fact not only ineffective but potentially dangerous to people, and doctor stokes probably encounters a lot of people who say, i was wearing my mask all the time. It was supposed to be an and 95 mask, that they may be infected because of the miss leading information. You can go through price fixing, pockets hearing, price gouging, also the deceptive misleading ads and pitches. All of them, directly earn the result of these platforms complicity in false and fake scams. Congresswoman schakowsky, let me turn to you for a couple minutes. You coauthored this letter. As the senator was just talking about it. Would you talk about that . What exactly are you too calling to be done . I would like to ask you, as we are here now, we are focusing on scams, fraud, ripping people off in the name of covid19 safety or health, or cures, or whatever it is. Tell us more about this letter and where this needs to go . Congresswoman, you are muted as well. Sorry. There we go. There we go. There are a number of tools that we can use. When is going to the federal trades commission which really does have the authority, not only to force the fraudulent adds to be taken down but there are also penetrating penalties that the federal trade commission could use. We are calling at this point, we are calling out google to take responsibility. This issue of the immunity that these platforms its a really dangerous