Facebook has banned misinformation about all vaccines after years of harmful, unfounded health claims spreading on its platform.
As part of its policy on Covid-19-related misinformation, Facebook will now remove reports with false allegations about all vaccines, the company announced in a blog post on Monday.
These new community guidelines apply to user-generated placements, and paid ads, which are already prohibited from including such misinformation. Instagram users will experience the same restrictions.
“We will start implementing this policy immediately, with a specific focus on pages, groups and accounts that violate these rules,” said Guy Rosen, who oversees content decisions. “We will continue to expand our enforcement in the coming weeks.”
It is known that groups on Facebook are creating echo chambers of misinformation and fueled the rise of anti-vaccine communities and rhetoric. Under the new policy, groups where users repeatedly share prohibited content will be closed.
Facebook has repeatedly updated its Covid-19 content policy as the pandemic develops. In April 2020, it began adding a panel of facts from the CDC to reports on coronavirus to combat misinformation. This often made incorrect information about vaccines less visible on the platform, but it stopped removing them.
That began to change in December, when the company stepped up its coronavirus policy and began removing posts about Covid-19 that had been scrapped by public health experts. These include reports suggesting that vaccines contain microchips, claiming that wearing a face mask does not help prevent the spread of Covid-19, and claiming that 5G technology contributes to or causes coronavirus infections.
Facebook will now broaden this ban by making false claims that Covid-19 is synthetic, that vaccines are not effective in preventing the disease, or that it is safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine.
The ban does not stop with Covid-related content and will also include lies, suggesting that vaccines cause autism – an unsubstantiated claim made by many people in the anti-wax community.
Despite the new policy, there remains misinformation about vaccine on Facebook and Instagram, which Facebook owns. The best search results for ‘Covid vaccine’ on Instagram were yet to arrive conspiracy theory reports Monday morning.
Facebook has been criticized over the past few months for handling incorrect information about Covid-19. In December, it allowed a prominent conspiracy theory video to go viral on the platform, and later failed to successfully remove the pages of a prominent anti-vaccine activist who went on to create new accounts after being banned.
Matilda Boseley reported