Mailchimp Digital Marketing Prohibits Anti-Vaccination Content



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The digital marketing specialist, Mailchimp, has withdrawn from its platform several anti-vaccination activists and will no longer provide services to newsletters offering anti-vaccination content.

The decision to block anti-vaccination rhetoric follows similar actions by other technology companies and is in step with growing pressure from public health advocates and lawmakers on digital platforms to limit the spread of misinformation about health.

"Mailchimp has closed a number of accounts for anti-vaccination content contrary to our Terms of Use, and we are adding this category to our current searches for prohibited content," a Mailchimp spokesperson said in a statement. forwarded to NBC News. "The spread of false information about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines poses a serious threat to public health and causes real harm. We can not allow these individuals and groups to use our marketing platform to spread harmful messages and broaden their audiences. "

The company began to quietly apply this decision last week.

"We trust the world's largest health authorities, such as the CDC, WHO, and PAA, and follow their advice when assessing this type of misuse of our platform," the statement said. spokesperson, referring to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Worldwide. Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Disinformation on vaccines, which had already been allowed to grow on the sidelines of many mainstream Internet destinations, has received increasing attention in the last six months, especially when health officials warned of the upsurge of certain preventable diseases.

Earlier in 2019, Amazon had shot anti-vaccination documentaries of its Prime Video service and several books from its market. Facebook has begun to stop advertising spreading "hoaxes about vaccines" and has announced its intention to reduce the visibility of misinformation about shared vaccines on its platform. YouTube has also disabled advertising on anti-vaccination videos and reduced the ranking of content related to health misinformation in search results. Pinterest has blocked all vaccine related search results.

These denials from the platforms shocked advocates of vaccination who, for years, were well served by referral algorithms that stimulated controversial and conspiratorial content, such as the underlying and discredited notion of which vaccines are the cause of autism, a unifying theory anti-vaccination groups.

The spread of such false information has increased parents' reluctance to vaccinate, leading to an upsurge in vaccine – preventable diseases. This year, 1,022 cases of measles were confirmed in 28 states, the highest number of cases since 1992, according to the CDC. Seven states are currently experiencing a measles epidemic, a disease that was officially eradicated in the United States in 2000.

Mailchimp, which has long been one of the most popular e-mail marketing services, announced this week its expansion into creating original content with series deployment projects, movies and podcasts on related themes to entrepreneurship in 2019.

Since Mailchimp's decision to ban anti-vaccination content, activists have been striving to find new hosts for their e-mail lists, both the original method used by political activists and funders to connect with volunteers and donors before the ubiquity of social media. borders to reach their audiences and solicit donations as a result of the wider repression.

Anti-vaccine activist Larry Cook spoke of Mailchimp's decision in a newsletter on Wednesday.

"If you have not heard it yet, Mailchimp – an email program used for more than four years to send emails to subscribers – has closed many accounts because these accounts share" anti-vaccine "content. "Cook wrote. "As the war against our freedom intensified and censorship increased, so did my spending as an activist."

Cook, who leads one of the most popular anti-vaccination efforts online and a Facebook group with more than 165,000 members, has not sent back a comment request. In his newsletter, he told his subscribers that he had not been started since Mailchimp, but had already moved to Sendy, an alternative newsletter provider, as a precaution.

"It's not a matter of * if * you're going to be stopped, it's a matter of * when *" he writes.

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