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WASHINGTON — In March, Andy Slavitt, then-President Biden’s chief pandemic adviser, called Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, with an ominous warning.

Mr. Slavitt and other White House officials have been negotiating with Facebook for weeks to urge the company to stop the spread of misinformation about coronavirus vaccines. Many Americans who refused to be vaccinated cited false stories they had read on Facebook, including theories that vaccines could cause infertility, stillborn babies, and autism. Mr. Slavitt and other officials felt that administrators had diverted the blame and resisted requests for information.

“In Eight Weeks” Mr. Slavitt told Mr. Clegg.“Facebook will be the world’s #1 story Pandemic.”

Mr. Slavitt’s guess was not far off. Nearly three months later, with cases of the Delta variant rising, Mr Biden said Facebook was “killing people” – a comment that put the social network at the center of public debate about the virus.

Mr. Biden’s comment, which later backed off a bit, was the culmination of meetings with the company that increasingly fought over the spread of misinformation. Interviews with management officials, Facebook employees, and others with knowledge of internal debates have uncovered new details about who attended the talks and what fueled frustrations between the White House and the Silicon Valley giant.

Interviews ranked high on both sides, compared to those who only spoke anonymously because the conversations were private, including those close to Facebook and those with ties to management. In March, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called White House chief of staff Ron Klain and discussed health misinformation. The White House was so enraged by Facebook’s responses at internal meetings that at one point it wanted to hear from data scientists at the company rather than from lobbyists. And the nation’s top doctor provided social media reps with anecdotes from doctors and nurses interacting with Covid-19 patients who believed in misinformation.

Talks between the White House and Facebook continue. But just as Mr. Biden faced a setback in the fight against the coronavirus, the crack has complicated an already turbulent relationship. The White House missed its goal of getting 70 percent of American adults to get at least one vaccine by July 4, and the highly contagious Delta variant has caused an increase in cases since then. The United States averaged more than 110,000 new daily cases last week, up from nearly 13,000 a month ago. In response, the administration has reversed some public health recommendations, confusing many Americans with requirements such as wearing masks.

The vast majority of new cases are among unvaccinated people. The White House on Thursday urged pediatricians to include vaccination in back-to-school sports 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 tackling widespread vaccine hesitancy and ultimately the pandemic.

“We’ve been working with Facebook since the transition on this issue,” said White House spokesman Mike Gwin. Actively promoted content on their platform that misleads the American public. ”

Facebook has strongly opposed criticism from the White House, publicly accusing the company of making the company a scapegoat for failing to meet the administration’s vaccination goals. Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said the White House didn’t give the company enough credit for promoting the vaccine. He said the social network has been working with the White House for “months” to get people vaccinated, bringing features like prominent links to vaccination clinics.

“We are removing Covid-related content that violates our guidelines and continue to link to authoritative health information in all Covid-related posts,” said Mr Stone.

Mr Gwin said the administration needed the help of not only Facebook, but also other technology platforms, elected leaders and media outlets to disseminate accurate information about the vaccine. But management officials say that aggressively denouncing prominent TV personalities on certain media such as Fox News may risk alienating some viewers and making them less likely to be vaccinated.

Some close to the administration said the White House believed Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, turned out to be particularly problematic. Human rights defenders and election officials have received similar complaints in recent years about the company’s handling of misinformation, saying executives have pointed to steps taken to share truthful information but avoid liability for the lies spread widely in its services.

Mr. Biden’s frustrations with Facebook started before the pandemic. His team argued with the company over the decision not to verify political ads during the presidential campaign, especially after groups supporting Donald J. Trump ran ads that made false claims about Mr. Biden’s interactions with Ukrainian officials. At one point in the campaign, Mr. Biden described the company’s chief executive as “a real problem” and said, “I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan.”

After the election, Mr. Biden’s transition team held meetings with multiple organizations about Covid-19 misinformation, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest, as well as Fox News and CNN.

In the meetings that started in December, Dr., who will later take the title of general surgeon. Vivek Murthy; DJ Patil, Chief technology officer of Mr. Biden’s migration team; and Rob Flaherty, digital strategy director for Mr. Biden. They said that they want to ensure that people who hesitate to get vaccinated receive accurate information about vaccines.

Authorities have asked tech companies to prevent false statements about the virus from circulating. Authorities also asked companies how many “fence caregivers” on their site hesitated to get vaccinated.

In the weeks that followed, many social media companies struggled to dispel health misinformation. However, some information sought by the White House was shared.

While YouTube didn’t specify how much of the video’s content was related to Covid-19 misinformation, it did provide data showing that 16 out of 10,000 views violated its content guidelines. Twitter said it has opened its data for researchers and academics to examine the spread of misinformation on the site, and has shared with the White House that it has created a “strike” system to improve police accounts that spread the most Covid misinformation.

Facebook provided information from CrowdTangle, a owned data tracking tool used by academics and journalists. But some close to the administration said the company was refraining from requests for more information from Facebook officials, including Brian Rice, the top Democrat lobbyist in the White House, and Kang-Xing Jin, Facebook’s health director.

When Mr. Patil requested data on how often false information was viewed and spread, the company said it could not provide such data. Facebook told White House officials it was grappling with content that wasn’t clearly false, such as posts that cast doubt on vaccines but didn’t clearly violate the social network’s health misinformation rules. Facebook allows people to express their experiences with vaccines, such as pain or side effects after getting a shot, as long as they don’t explicitly endorse the lies.

“Seriously?” Patil texted the Biden team during the video call, according to someone familiar with the correspondence. “We have to cross the talking points. People are literally dying.”

Management officials and people familiar with the meetings said Facebook responded to some requests for information by talking about vaccine promotion strategies. The company noted that it conducts surveys of how many Facebook users have been vaccinated in the United States, and uses the company’s software to amplify pre-vaccine messages and direct people to vaccination clinics.

According to government officials, Facebook was purposely complicating things. Officials said no one understands the data about the social network better than Facebook, and they wanted the company to help guide them to the right questions.

Toward the end of the transition, Mr. Patil asked to meet with more members of Facebook’s data science team, not lobbyists without a technical background, to get detailed information about where misinformation on the site originated and how common it was through posts. Facebook said Mr. Jin, an engineer who oversees the company’s healthcare efforts, attended most of the meetings.

Mr Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital strategy, pressed for more information on what the company would do about posts that didn’t openly violate the platform’s rules, such as widely shared videos that promote misinformation about vaccines but cast doubt on their effectiveness. from vaccines.

After Mr. Slavitt met with Mr. Clegg in March, the White House ordered surgeon general Dr. By including Murthy, he increased the pressure on the company.

At a meeting this spring, Dr. Murthy offered anecdotes from nurses and doctors. Health workers said that Covid-19 patients were afraid of being vaccinated because of false information they read on Facebook. Last month Dr. In his first official advice to the country, Murthy made his criticism public, noting that false information was an “immediate threat to public health.”

The next day, Mr. Biden commented “killing people” and went back and forth full of hatred. Mr. Slavitt, who later left the administration, sought to play the role of mediator, urging Facebook to soften the rhetoric and advised the White House to be open about solutions on how the platform can combat misinformation.

Management and Facebook restarted talks, and both sides agreed on the need to soften their language. At a recent meeting, Dr. The Biden team, including Murthy and Mr. Patil, stressed that vaccination efforts have stalled, medical officials are at risk, and deaths could rise before further sanctions are imposed by the company.

At the end of the meeting, the two sides thanked each other for their sincerity and agreed to continue the meeting. They left without finding any concrete solution.