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Facebook is facing growing pressure from health experts to fight against the rise of anti-vaccination groups that install on the social network platform and spread misinformation.
Under the heading of "anti-vaxxers", activists unite en mbade to promote often uninformed facts in order to persuade others to join their movement, the move that Facebook, according to experts, does not apparently does not do enough to stop.
These groups are numerous and in increasing numbers. One of these groups, called "Stop Compulsory Vaccination", has more than 150,000 members and hundreds of people appeared in Olympia, Washington last week to protest a bill making it harder to families not to vaccinate their children.
The claims made on these pages are, to say the least, controversial. Some relate to the link between vaccines and autism diagnoses, while others claim that large amounts of vitamin C can cure the negative effects of vaccines, even if they are completely safe.
Most Facebook groups with a large number of subscribers are members-only and their approval is left in the hands of the group's administrators.
Facebook is facing the ethical decision to take action against these harmful groups and eliminate them from the platform, as was the case in the past with pages and groups related to Iran and Russia .
Facebook's previous policy of deleting pages involved workarounds for administrators who want to continue to deliver their message. If a page owner had more than one page but only one violated Facebook's rules, the page breaking the rules would be taken offline, which would leave the other pages intact.
The problem is that the owners of pages could simply migrate the same community to the "backup" page and continue as if nothing had happened.
But, in a blog post last month, dealing with changes made by Facebook to its policy, everything has changed. He added that he "can now also delete other pages and groups, even if that specific page or group did not reach the threshold required to not be published alone".
The effort to permanently delete these pages is welcomed by those who are supposed to be affected by the "negative effects" of vaccines. A Facebook user said that she would prefer to live with autism than to die of polio.
Ethan Lindenberger, an Ohio teenager sought advice from Reddit after his mother did not allow him to be vaccinated.
The message sparked thousands of interactions and most commented that he must be 18 to be vaccinated. Lindenberger did exactly that and has already received five vaccines.
"If I catch whooping cough, I might be able to cope with it because I am older and have a good immune system, but who can say I do not cough for my two year old sister?" he asked when to speak to the BBC. "It's an extremely scary thought," he added.
The misinformation situation
Many different companies and organizations have followed the movement of misinformation and the pressure has never been greater for companies, including Facebook, to be more transparent and proactive in stopping the spread of false dangerous information.
The world has been watching Facebook since the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook has recently taken a step forward by announcing the conclusion of five new partnerships before the general election in India, to be held in May. The partnerships were created to strengthen its fact-checking capabilities to prevent disinformation from mingling with voters' opinions.
The partners of India Today, Vishvas.news, Factly, Newsmobile and Fact Crescendo are all internationally certified fact-checking networks that monitor and review news on Facebook to determine their accuracy and timeliness. accuracy.
In recent weeks, Facebook has announced the removal of hundreds of pages that coordinated non-authentic information from countries such as Iran, Indonesia and Myanmar.
Google has also made progress in securing elections. He announced that he would focus on misinformation campaigns and state-sponsored phishing attacks to prevent abuses during elections.
Measures will also be taken to promote authentic election-related information and to actively combat the effects of misinformation.
These steps include adding a "fact check" tag to indexed news articles, which helps users check the information they read in the major articles. In addition, as a result of the increasing number of crooks seeking to take advantage of the growing popularity of online news to earn money, Google has banned websites. its advertising network to promote deceptive content.
Despite the advances in the right direction, the others are still not happy. Mozilla recently signed an open letter to the European Commission, urging it to compel Facebook to be more transparent and to further fight misinformation on its platform.
While Mozilla said he appreciated the "tremendous work that Facebook and others have done to fight misinformation on their platforms," he believes more could be done.
It refers to Facebook preventing third parties from badyzing ads on its platform and believes that Facebook must "develop an open and functional API that can be used by any developer, researcher, or organization to develop tools, critical badytics, and badytics. research designed to: educate and empower users so that they understand and resist, therefore, targeted disinformation campaigns. "
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