Anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been banned from Instagram, a spokesman said.
His account was removed on Wednesday for “repeatedly sharing denied claims about coronavirus or vaccines,” said a Facebook spokesman, owner of Instagram.
Kennedy’s Facebook page was still active on Thursday morning.
When asked if this account would also be banned, the spokesman said: “We don’t automatically disable accounts in our applications, because accounts can post about different things in our different services.”
On Monday, Facebook announced that it was expanding efforts to crack down on accounts that spread false claims about the coronavirus pandemic or vaccines, including Covid-19 vaccines. The company said it is also making it difficult to locate these accounts through the search function.
“We continue to improve search results on our platforms. When people search for vaccine or Covid-19-related content on Facebook, we promote relevant and reliable results and provide third-party resources to connect people to specialized vaccine information” , published release states. “On Instagram, in addition to presenting reliable results on Search, in the coming weeks we will make it harder to find accounts in searches that discourage people from being vaccinated.”
Kennedy, the son of former US senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, has been speaking out against vaccines for years. In May 2019, several of his family members wrote in an opinion piece that their controversial allegations “helped spread dangerous misinformation”.
“We love Bobby. He’s one of the great champions of the environment,” Sister Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Brother Joseph P. Kennedy II and niece Maeve Kennedy McKean wrote to the Politico. “However, he is wrong with vaccines.”
Kennedy did not immediately respond to NBC News’s request for comment.
