Facebook banned misinformation about all vaccines after years of harmful and unfounded health claims that proliferated on its platform.
As part of its Covid-19 disinformation policy, Facebook will now remove posts with false claims about all vaccines, the company announced in a blog post on Monday.
These new community guidelines apply to user-generated posts, as well as paid ads, which have already been banned from including this incorrect information. Instagram users will face the same restrictions.
“We will begin to apply this policy immediately, with a particular focus on pages, groups and accounts that violate these rules,” said Guy Rosen, who oversees content decisions. “We will continue to expand our application in the coming weeks.”
Facebook groups are known to create disinformation echo chambers and fuel the emergence of anti-vaccine communities and rhetoric. Under the new policy, groups where users repeatedly share banned content will be terminated.
Facebook has repeatedly updated its policies on Covid-19 content as the pandemic evolved. In April 2020, he started adding a CDC facts panel to fight disinformation to the coronavirus posts. It often made misinformation about vaccines less visible on their platform, but it was never removed.
That began to change in December, when the company enforced its coronavirus policies and began removing posts about Covid-19 that had been unmasked by public health experts. This includes posts suggesting that vaccines contain microchips, states that wearing a face mask does not help prevent the spread of Covid-19 and claims that 5G technology contributes to or causes coronavirus infections.
Facebook will now extend this ban, addressing false claims that Covid-19 is synthetic, that vaccines are not effective in preventing the disease, or that it is safer to catch the disease than getting the vaccine.
The ban does not stop at Covid-related content and will also target falsehoods, including the suggestion that vaccines cause autism – an unfounded claim made by many in the antivax community.
Despite the new policy, misinformation about the vaccine remains on Facebook and Instagram, owned by Facebook. The main search results for “Covid vaccine” on Instagram were still appearing conspiracy theory reports Monday morning.
Facebook has faced criticism in recent months for dealing with Covid-19 misinformation. In December, it allowed a major conspiracy theory video to go viral on the platform and later failed to successfully remove the pages of a prominent anti-vaccine activist who continued to create new accounts after being banned.
Matilda Boseley contributed reporting