Efficient instantly, Facebook says it’s redoubling its efforts to “take away false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines usually in the course of the pandemic.”
The social media platform that’s been dubbed a “well being misinformation superspreader” and roundly criticized for its two-faced strategy to taking motion in opposition to well being hoaxes, conspiracy theories, racial justice, bullying, and politics, claims that it’s already been laborious at work cleaning data that has been “debunked by public well being consultants”—significantly on pages and in teams—and prohibiting additional claims in advertisements. Facebook started providing free advertisements to the World Well being Group in March 2019.
Certainly, the corporate started trying to curb well being misinformation, together with anti-vaccine content material, even earlier than the pandemic. In 2018 it started deleting different well being pages. And in 2019, it once more thought of curbing questionable content material in the course of the twin rise of a measles outbreak and the proliferation of anti-vaccine content material throughout social media platforms.
Facebook says it’s leaning on the experience of the WHO and others in deciding which claims to take away, which embody:
- COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
- Vaccines will not be efficient at stopping the illness they’re meant to guard in opposition to
- It’s safer to get the illness than to get the vaccine
- Vaccines are poisonous, harmful, or trigger autism
You may see an entire listing of the claims, together with these surrounding vaccine content material and COVID-19 extra broadly, that Facebook says it’s working to purge here.
