Instagram dropped the report by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the political heir and prominent anti-vaccine activist, on Wednesday because of false information related to the coronavirus.
“We removed this account for repeatedly sharing denied claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” said Facebook, owner of Instagram, in a statement.
Kennedy, the son of former US Senator and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, worked for decades as an environmental lawyer, but is now better known as an advocate for vaccines. A 2019 study found that two groups, including their non-profit organization, now called Children’s Health Defense, had funded more than half of Facebook ads spreading misinformation about vaccines.
He found an even wider audience during the pandemic on platforms like Instagram, where he had 800,000 followers. Although Kennedy said he is not opposed to vaccines, as long as they are safe, he regularly endorses discredited links between vaccines and autism and argued that it is safer to contract the coronavirus than to be inoculated against it.
Facebook is becoming more aggressive in its efforts to eliminate misinformation about vaccines, saying this week that it would remove posts with erroneous claims about coronavirus, coronavirus vaccines and vaccines in general, whether they be paid ads or user-generated messages. In addition to Kennedy’s Instagram account, the company said it removed eight other Instagram accounts and Facebook pages on Wednesday under its updated policies.
They did not include Kennedy’s Facebook page, which was still active on Thursday and makes many of the same baseless claims for more than 300,000 followers. The company that said it did not automatically disable accounts on its platforms and that there were no plans to withdraw Mr. Kennedy’s Facebook account “at this time”.
Children’s Health Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Members of Kennedy’s family spoke out against his anti-vaccine efforts, including a brother, sister and niece who accused him of spreading “dangerous misinformation” in a column they wrote to Politico in 2019. Another niece, Kerry Kennedy Meltzer, a doctor from the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital / Weill Cornell Medical Center, wrote an opinion essay in The New York Times in December contesting his claims.
“I love my Uncle Bobby,” she wrote. “I admire him for many reasons, mainly for his decades-long struggle for a cleaner environment. But when it comes to vaccines, he is wrong. “