Facebook on Monday announced a major crackdown on the spread of what the tech giant considers ‘false allegations’ about COVID-19 and vaccines.
The company will continue to remove incorrect information regarding the coronavirus and vaccines from its platform, including allegations that the virus was manufactured in a laboratory, that vaccines are not effective in preventing diseases, that it is safer to control the disease. get as the vaccine, and that vaccines are generally toxic, dangerous or cause autism.
“In addition to sharing reliable information, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic,” the company’s head of health said. Kang-Xing Jin, said. said in a news editor. “Today, after consultation with leading health organizations, including the WHO, we are expanding the list of false claims that we will remove to include additional decrepit claims about COVID-19 and vaccines.”
The full list of false claims now subject to removal is listed on the Facebook Help Center webpage. It broadly contains any content that underestimates the severity of COVID-19 or discourages good health practices such as wearing a mask.
“We will begin implementing this policy immediately, with a specific focus on pages, groups and accounts that violate these rules, and we will continue to expand our enforcement over the coming weeks,” said Guy Rosen, vice president of integrity , written. “Groups, pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram that repeatedly share these discarded claims can be completely removed.”
Rosen added that the company intends to gain access to credible information through ‘promot'[ing] relevant, authoritative results “when people on the platform search for vaccination or coronavirus-related content.
He noted that the content monitoring of the coronavirus pandemic has been going on since December, and now the list of false claims has been expanded.
The move, however, means a significant departure from past action. As the New York Times reported, in the past, the company has chosen to “rank” incorrect information about the coronavirus, or to lower the content in people’s news feeds. But now the company is acting by removing such content completely.
According to the news editor, the new action is in response to a ruling by the company’s supervisory board, which found that the rules and standards for misinformation regarding health were “inappropriately vague.”
The news comes as Facebook and other major social media companies are intensively investigated for their censorship practices. If the new action serves as an indication, it appears that Facebook does not intend to engage in aggressive content suppression.