Facebook says it will remove all false vaccine claims

For years, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories found a welcome home on Facebook. The social network considered the issue to be free speech and the anti-vaxxer groups it hosted to be about as dangerous as the Flat-Earthers. But now that providing the public with accurate vaccine information is a matter of existential importance, Facebook says it is launching an unprecedented campaign to completely eliminate false claims on the subject.

In one blog post Facebook wrote plenty of words on Monday praising its efforts to provide accurate information about vaccines to the several billion people who use its products. In all of the self-congratulations was a brief note on implementing stricter policies to tackle vaccine misinformation. Kang-Xing Jin, h from Facebookead of hhealth, written:

In addition to sharing reliable information, we are stepping up our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram regarding COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Today, following consultations with major health organizations, including the WHO, we are expanding the list of false claims that we will be removing to include other debunked claims about COVID-19 and vaccines. Learn more about how we tackle COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation.

It wasn’t a sudden movement, but it is likely to open the platform to new levels of moderation chaos and angry users. In 2019, Facebook sworn to lower the ranking of pages and groups that “spread misinformation about vaccinations in the news feed and search” and said it will reject advertisements that spread false information about vaccinations. He also said he would remove targeted ad categories like “vaccine controversies,” reminding everyone that yes, Facebook has a special category for this stuff.

As the anti-vaxxer trend morphed into something resembling a social movement, the covid-19 pandemic swept the world and it became clear that this problem was more than a resurgence of measles. In December, Facebook announced that it would begin removing posts that spread false information about covid-19 vaccines, in particular. Today’s move goes all the way. Tsociety claims it remove any incorrect information related to the vaccine falls under the criteria created by Facebook in coordination with “the World Health Organization (WHO), government health authorities and stakeholders of all types of people who use our services”.

The list of prohibited content includes simple things like claims that “vaccines cause autism” or “vaccines cause the disease they are supposed to protect”. These points should be fairly easy to apply, but critics are already worried about some of the trickier rules. Journalist and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci highlighted on Twitter that several rules could lead to legitimate research being flagged as bogus by Facebook as our knowledge of covid-19 and related vaccines continues to evolve.

Even though all of the rules have been carefully crafted to only target content that Facebook doesn’t want, we have too many examples of the social network being unable to enforce its own policies, and its automated removal systems fail too often. Just today the BBC reported on the case of a photographer in England who had his work rejected by Facebook’s advertising algorithm on at least seven different occasions. Examples of rejected photos included a fireworks display blocked for “promoting weapons” and a photo of a basic cow in a dark field that was labeled “overtly sexual”.

Do we absolutely need Facebook as a living space for scientists to share preliminary information on vaccines? It seems questionable. Do we need the freedom to share openly sexual photos of cows? Absolutely. As with anything to do with moderation and censorship, be careful what you want.