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The parent company of Instagram, Facebook, has a new policy on information about vaccines, but it does not have a sufficient impact.
In March, Facebook announced its intention to fight misinformation on vaccines on its platforms, including Instagram. But a quick search for vaccine-related hashtags reveals that the popular, image-based social network is full of misinformation about vaccines, ranging from wild government plots to vaccine-related injuries to falsified numbers and false studies.
Facebook's policy, which has apparently been promulgated on Instagram, promises that anti-vaxx people and organizations would lose their rankings and not be included in recommendations or research. They also promised to stop buying ads containing anti-vaxx themes and no longer display anti-vaxx groups in the hashtag results.
Although all of this sounds good, it does not seem to work to prevent false messages from passing.
Last month, an Instagram spokesperson told CNN Business that the photo platform would block hashtags containing harmful anti-vaxx messages, such as #vaccinescauseautism, #poisonaccass and #vaccinescauseaids.
A quick search reveals an impressive number of anti-vaxx propaganda in seconds. And it's bad.
For example, there have been over 20,000 publications including the #vaccineskill hashtag, many of which had anti-vaccination and false information as their theme.
Many anti-vaxx memes are based on disturbing images, such as those of a baby attacked by needles.
Others just lie about vaccines containing poison and being "unnatural". As if something that contains conservatives is worse than dying of measles.
And many behavioral and autism problems are attributed to vaccines – instead of learning more about the true reason for the increase in these conditions (and, at the same time, many of these memes are extremely insulting to those who have autism or have children).
The vaccine injury is no better – there are mountains of false information and terror, creating a scary story that vaccines can hurt or kill your children, and that the Centers for Disease Control, the government and the Pharmaceutical industry hide all real data from us. It also contains a number of repetitive stories that start to look good once you've read enough.
Many memes circulated a false story that large pharmaceutical companies were repeatedly sued for dangerous vaccines, but that the public was unaware – this information is either misinterpreted or simply wrong.
Others contain completely falsified and ridiculous claims.
And many people say the government is advocating deadly vaccines that kill babies and make money for them.
As you can see, even reading our examples, looking at several anti-vaxx memes can affect your thinking – and this is even more true for people who may not have an education or new parents who lack confidence in what they need. to keep their children safe.
In addition, there is a measles epidemic in the United States and around the world. More than 700 cases have been reported in the United States alone – up 300% from last year, and higher than any other year in the past two decades. The reason? Experts say that "hesitation in immunization" from parents on social media is a major part of the problem.
Facebook said: "We also want to provide people with additional context to decide whether to read, share, or engage in conversations about information posted on Facebook. We are exploring ways to give people more accurate information from vaccine specialist organizations, top of the results of related research, pages dealing with the topic and invitations to join groups on the subject. We will have an update on this soon. "
It looks like their heart is in the right place, but when it comes to preventing fake information on Instagram, it just does not seem to work well enough.
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