The World Health Organization listed " vaccine hesitancy," which is the reluctance or refusal to get vaccinated despite availability of a treatment, one of the top 10 threats of 2019.
Users opposed to vaccines have used the social network to spread misinformation in groups where members have to be approved, making it difficult for Facebook to police this content, according to The Guardian.Įthan Lindenberger, an Ohio teenager who got vaccinated despite his mom's opposition, told US lawmakers this week in a committee hearing that his mother got misinformation about vaccines from social networks such as Facebook. The misinformation may have contributed to an outbreak of measles in the US. Instagram also won't recommend the information on pages that display hashtags, which are designed to help users find posts about a particular topic.įacebook's move comes as it faces mounting pressure from lawmakers, activists and health experts to prevent anti-vax misinformation from going viral. Recommendations for vaccine misinformation won't be displayed in Instagram's "Explore" section, which surfaces posts based on the content a user likes. The effort to combat anti-vaccination misinformation will include other sites Facebook owns. Facebook will also reject ads that include misinformation about vaccines and won't allow advertisers to target users interested in topics such as "vaccine controversies." The company also won't recommend these groups or pages to users when they search for vaccination information on the social network.įacebook said it will rely on the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help identify vaccine conspiracies, the company said in a blog post. On Thursday, Facebook said it would demote the ranking of groups or pages that spread misinformation about vaccines on its News Feed and in search results. Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.įacebook is stepping up its efforts to curb the spread of misinformation about vaccines, a move that follows mounting criticism that the world's social network hasn't done enough to combat the medical myths.
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