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Facebook has banned misinformation about all vaccines after years of harmful and unsubstantiated health claims proliferating on its platform.
As part of its policy on disinformation related to Covid-19, Facebook will now remove posts containing false claims about all vaccines, the company said in a blog post on Monday.
These new community rules apply to user-generated posts as well as paid advertisements, which were previously prohibited from including such disinformation. Instagram users will face the same restrictions.
“We will begin enforcing this policy immediately, with a particular focus on pages, groups and accounts that violate these rules,” said Guy Rosen, who oversees content decisions. “We will continue to expand our application over the coming weeks.”
Groups on Facebook are known to create echo chambers for disinformation and have fueled the rise of anti-vaccine communities and rhetoric. Under the new policy, groups in which users repeatedly share prohibited content will be closed.
Facebook has repeatedly updated its policies on Covid-19 content as the pandemic evolves. In April 2020, he began adding to articles on the coronavirus a CDC fact panel to combat disinformation. He often made the misinformation about vaccines less visible on his platform, but stopped before removing it.
That started to change in December, when the company stepped up its coronavirus policy and began removing messages about Covid-19 that had been debunked by public health experts. This included articles suggesting 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 expand this ban, responding to false claims that Covid-19 is synthetic, that vaccines are not effective in preventing disease, or that it is safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine.
The ban doesn’t stop at Covid-related content and will also target lies, including suggesting that vaccines cause autism – a baseless claim made by many in the anti-vax community.
Despite the new policy, vaccine misinformation remains on Facebook and Instagram, owned by Facebook. Top search results for ‘Covid Vaccine’ on Instagram kept showing up conspiracy theory accounts Monday morning.
Facebook has been criticized in recent months for its handling of disinformation about Covid-19. In December, he allowed a major conspiracy theory video to go viral on the platform, and later failed to remove the pages of a prominent anti-vaccine campaigner who went on to create new accounts after its ban.
Matilda Boseley contributed reporting
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