Years of vaccine conspiracy theories found a welcome home on Facebook. The social network views the issue as freedom of speech and the anti-vaxxer groups he has presented are about as dangerous as platitudes. But now that it’s a matter of existential importance to get accurate vaccinations for the public, Facebook says it’s launching an unprecedented campaign to completely remove false allegations on the subject.
In a blogpos On Monday, Facebook wrote many words to write off its efforts to provide accurate vaccine information to the few billion people who use its products. In all those self-congratulations was a brief note on the application of stricter policies to combat the disinfection of vaccines. Kang-Xing Jin, Facebook se head van hwealth, write:
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. After consultations with leading health organizations, including the WHO, today we are expanding the list of false claims that we will remove to include additional decrepit claims about COVID-19 and vaccines. Learn more about how we go control of COVID-19 and incorrect information on vaccines.
It was not a sudden move, but it will likely open the platform to new levels of moderate chaos and anger users. In 2019, Facebook promise to rank pages and groups that “spread misinformation about vaccinations in News Feed and Search” and said that it would reject ads that spread misinformation about vaccinations. It also said it would remove targeted ad categories such as “vaccine controversies”, reminding everyone that Facebook has a special category for these things.
As the anti-vaxxer trend turned into something resembling a social movement, the covid-19 pandemic overwhelmed the world and it became clear that this issue was more than a revival of measles. In December, Facebook said they would specifically start deleting posts indicating false information about the 19-vaccine vaccines. Today’s move goes all the way. This company claims it remove all vaccination-related misinformation that fall within the criteria set up by Facebook in collaboration with the “World Health Organization (WHO), government health authorities and stakeholders from across the spectrum of people using our service.”
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The banned content list contains simple items such as claims that “vaccines cause autism” or “vaccines cause the disease against which they are intended to protect.” These points should be fairly easy to enforce, but critics are already raising concerns about some of the more cumbersome rules. Journalist and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci pointed out on Twitter that multiple rules could lead to legitimate research being branded fake by Facebook while we continue to develop knowledge about covid-19 and related vaccines.
Though all the rules are thoroughly designed to target only the content that Facebook does not want, we have too many examples showing that the social network is terrible at enforcing its own policies, and its automatic removal systems fail too often. Just today, the BBC report about the case of a photographer in England who on at least seven different occasions rejected his work through Facebook’s advertising algorithm. Examples of disapproved photos were a fireworks display blocked for ‘weapons promotion’ and a shot of a basic cow in a gloomy field labeled ‘openly sexual’.
Do we absolutely need Facebook as a scientific space for scientists to share preliminary information about vaccines? It can be debatable. Do we need the freedom to openly share sexual photos of cows? Absolutely. As with all things related to moderation and censorship, you need to be careful about what you want.