“We removed this account for repeatedly sharing denied claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” said a Facebook spokesman, owner of Instagram, in a statement.
Kennedy, the son of former US Attorney General, senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, has repeatedly spoken out against vaccines. He lobbied Congress to grant parents exemptions from state requirements that mandate that they vaccinate their children. The longtime Democrat downplays his anti-vaccine views, however, saying that he is in fact in favor of safe vaccines and noting that all his children have been vaccinated.
Kennedy’s Facebook page, with more than 300,000 followers, was still active at the time of publication. The company’s spokesman said there are no plans to remove this page “at this time”.
Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit group that chairs Kennedy who expresses skepticism about the health benefits of vaccines, said it could not immediately comment on Instagram’s actions.
Facebook has struggled for years to crack down on vaccine misinformation and announced yet another effort to do so earlier this week.
On Monday, the company announced several ways to better combat misinformation about vaccines, including making it harder to find accounts through Facebook’s Instagram searches that discourage people from being vaccinated.
The announcement came a day after CNN Business reported that Instagram continued to feature antivaxxer accounts prominently in its search results, while Facebook groups protesting the vaccines remained easy to find. The findings raised concerns among public health experts, as the United States is in the midst of its largest vaccine rollout to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.