For years, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories found a welcome home on Facebook. The social network saw the problem as being about free speech and the anti-xxxxx groups it hosted as being as dangerous as the flat Earthmen. But now that providing accurate information about vaccines to the public is an issue of existential importance, Facebook says it is launching an unprecedented campaign to completely remove false claims about it.
On a blog post on Monday, Facebook wrote many words praising its efforts to provide accurate vaccine information to the two billion people who use its products. Immersed in all that self-indulgence was a brief note on the implementation of stricter policies to combat vaccine misinformation. Kang-Xing Jin, h from Facebookinstead of hCheers, writes:
In addition to sharing reliable information, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Today, after consultation with major health organizations, including WHO, we are expanding the list of false claims that we will remove to include additional denied claims about COVID-19 and vaccines. Find out more about how we are doing combating the misinformation of COVID-19 and vaccines.
This was not a sudden movement, but it is likely to open the platform to new levels of chaos of moderation and angry users. In 2019, Facebook swore to reduce the ranking of pages and groups that “spread vaccine misinformation on News Feed and Search” and said they would reject ads that spread vaccine misinformation. He also said he would remove categories of ads targeted as “vaccine controversies”, reminding everyone that yes, Facebook had a special category for these things.
As the antivaxxer trend turned into something similar to a social movement, the covid-19 pandemic dominated the globe and it became clear that this problem was more than a resurgence of measles. In December, Facebook announced that it would begin removing posts that spread false information about covid-19 vaccines, specifically. Today’s change goes through. Tthe company says so remove all incorrect vaccine-related information that falls within the criteria established by Facebook in coordination with the “World Health Organization (WHO), government health authorities and stakeholders from across the spectrum of people who use our service”.
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The list of prohibited content includes direct items, such as claims that “vaccines cause autism” or “vaccines cause the disease they are designed to protect against”. These points should be quite easy to apply, but critics are already raising concerns about some of the more complicated rules. Journalist and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci pointed on twitter that several rules can lead to legitimate searches being flagged as false by Facebook, while our knowledge of covid-19 and related vaccines continues to evolve.
Even though all the rules have been painstakingly designed to target only content that Facebook doesn’t want, we have many examples that demonstrate that the social network is terrible at imposing its own policies, and their automated removal systems often fail. Only today, the Reported by BBC in the case of a photographer in England who had his work rejected by the Facebook ad algorithm on at least seven different occasions. Examples of rejected photos include a fireworks display that has been blocked to “promote weapons” and an image of a basic cow in a dark field that has been labeled “openly sexual”.
Do we absolutely need Facebook as a vital space for scientists to share preliminary information about vaccines? This seems debatable. Do we need the freedom to share openly sexual pictures of cows? Absolutely. As with all things related to moderation and censorship, be careful what you want.