For years, conspiracy theories against vaccines found a welcome home and Facebook. The social network considered the issue to be free speech and the anti-vaxxer groups they hosted were as dangerous as the terrestrial ones. But now that public information about vaccines is a matter of existential importance, Facebook claims to be launching an unprecedented campaign to completely eliminate false claims on the subject.
In a blog post on Monday, Facebook wrote many words announcing its efforts to provide accurate information about vaccines to the two million people who use its products. A brief note on the implementation of stricter policies to combat vaccine misinformation included all this happiness. Kang-Xing Jin, h. From Facebookead of hHealth, write:
In addition to sharing reliable information, we are expanding our efforts to eliminate false claims on Facebook and Instagram about vaccines against COVID-19, COVID-19, and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Today, following consultations with major health organizations, including the WHO, we expand the list of false claims that we will remove to include additional discredited claims about COVID-19 and vaccines. Learn more about how we are combat COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation.
It wasn’t a sudden move, but it is likely to open up the platform to new levels of moderation chaos and anger users. In 2019, Facebook he promised to reduce the ranking of pages and groups that “spread misinformation about vaccinations in News Feed and Search” and said they would reject ads that disseminated misinformation about vaccinations. He also said he would remove specific ad categories like “vaccine controversies,” reminding everyone that yes, Facebook had a special category for these things.
As the anti-vaxxer trend became something like a social movement, the covid-19 pandemic overwhelmed the world and it became clear that this problem was more than a resurgence of measles. In December, Facebook said it would begin removing posts that would promote false information about covid-19 vaccines, specifically. Today’s movement goes all the way. Tthe company claims it will remove all vaccine-related misinformation that falls within the criteria established by Facebook in coordination with the “World Health Organization (WHO), government health authorities and interest groups across the spectrum of people using our service.”
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The list of banned content includes simple articles, such as statements that “vaccines cause autism” or “vaccines cause the disease against which they must be protected.” These points should be fairly easy to apply, but critics are already worrying about some of the more complicated rules. Journalist and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci pointed out on Twitter that several rules could lead to legitimate research being flagged as false by Facebook as our knowledge about covid-19 and related vaccines continues to evolve.
Even if all the rules were worked out thoroughly to target only content that Facebook doesn’t want, we have too many examples that show that social networking is terrible when it comes to enforcing its own policies, and their automatic disposal systems fail too often. Just today, the The BBC reported about the case of a photographer in England who has turned down his work for Facebook’s advertising algorithm on at least seven different occasions. Examples of rejected photos included a fireworks castle blocked to “promote weapons” and a shot of a basic cow in a shady field labeled “openly sexual.”
Do we absolutely need Facebook as a living space for scientists to share preliminary information about vaccines? It seems debatable. Do we need the freedom to share openly sexual photos of cows? Absolutely. As with all things related to moderation and censorship, be careful what you want.