vaccines
NEW YORK (77WABC) – On Monday Facebook announced that it will remove posts with false claims about all vaccines across its site. Such false claims include assertions that vaccines cause autism or that it’s safer for people to become sick with Covid-19 rather than receive the vaccination for the disease that’s now killed almost a half a million Americans.
In October, the social networking giant prohibited people and companies from purchasing advertising that included false or misleading information about vaccines. In December, Facebook said it would remove posts with claims that had been debunked by the World Health Organization or government agencies.
Facebook’s latest move against misinformation now targets unpaid posts to the site as well as Facebook pages and groups. While Facebook has been cracking down on Covid-19 misinformation, it will attempt to ban all false claims surrounding around all vaccines. Facebook said it consulted with the World Health Organization and other leading health institutes to determine a list of false or misleading claims around Covid and vaccines in general.
In the past, Facebook had said it would only “downrank,” or push lower down in people’s News Feeds, misleading or false claims about vaccines, making it more difficult to find such groups or posts. Now posts, pages and groups containing such falsehoods will be removed from the platform entirely.
We're running the largest worldwide campaign to promote authoritative information about COVID-19 vaccines. https://t.co/AVD44IGaWn
— Meta Newsroom (@MetaNewsroom) February 8, 2021
