Facebook tries to catch up against vaccine misinformation

Facebook has published a report saying they’ve dealt with the accounts linked to 12 “key people” that promote vaccine misinformation online. Facebook and Instagram accounts linked to these 12 people, as well as pages and groups were removed in an effort to curb the anti-vaccine movement. 

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Other accounts linked to the 12 were not removed but were penalized, while other accounts’ posts were moved lower in the News Feed. Associated website domains to these 12 were also flagged so they won’t be given much exposure.

The move stems from a report titled “Why Platforms Must Act on Twelve Leading Online Anti-Vaxxers” by the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Anti-Vax Watch. It said that while the leading social media platforms have put in place some measures to battle against misinformation, it failed to “satisfactorily enforce those policies” which led to these 12 people being on a pedestal on the anti-vax side of things. 

Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ty and Charlene Bollinger, Sherri Tenpenny, Rizza Islam, Rashid Buttar, Erin Elizabeth, Sayer Ji, Kelly Brogan, Christiane Northrup, Ben Tapper, Kevin Jenkins – these 12 are said to account for 73% of Facebook’s anti-vax content. However, Facebook is saying the network of these 12 account for just 0.05% of all vaccine-related posts on the platform. It further downplayed the report saying it “analyzed only a narrow set of 483 pieces of content over six weeks from only 30 groups, some of which are as small as 2,500 users.”

The anti-vaxxers are just the tip of the iceberg though because there’s a far worse group of people. Tech Transparency Project has a report regarding militia groups and conspiracy theorists propagating on Facebook. Their biggest concern is how Facebook passively promoted misinformation in the group system by having false “Group Experts” promote thoughts of vaccines as a way of violating their freedom.

The Group Expert is a badge that FB group administrators can give to certain individuals. They’re supposed to be “trusted and well-informed” which is why having that badge on an anti-vax group further promotes distrust of vaccines. 

Facebook said that since the beginning of the pandemic, they’ve already removed 3,000 accounts, pages, and groups for violating rules against spreading of COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation. Well, it looks like they’ve got a lot more to do because the problem is growing in the same areas they say they’ve dealt with.