In a significant move, Facebook has announced that it will remove any misleading allegations and misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines on both Facebook and Instagram.
It is part of a larger movement to help combat false news about the pandemic. Since December, the platform has removed claims about coronaviruses that have been dismantled by health experts.
On Monday, however, the company extended this policy and specifically targets common anti-vax claims.
“Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims that we will remove to include additional disappointed claims about coronaviruses and vaccines,” said Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president. of integrity, wrote in a blog update.
This includes claims such as:
- COVID-19 is manufactured or man-made
- Vaccines are not effective in preventing the disease against which they are intended to protect
- It is safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
- Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism
Facebook will also remove fictitious claims that the vaccine will change people’s DNA or make them infertile, as well as false claims about where the vaccines are made or their effectiveness.
But how do we know that SARS-CoV-2 was not made in a laboratory?
The researchers know that SARS-CoV-2 was not manufactured in the laboratory because, if it were, there would be evidence of manipulation in the genetic data.
Thousands of scientists around the world have sequenced the genome of the virus that causes COVID-19 and made its results public, and there are no traces of the genome altered by the tools we have at our disposal.
Are vaccines safe?
While vaccine production has been accelerated, all approved COVID-19 vaccines have undergone the same rigorous clinical trials in the laboratory and also in humans as any other vaccine on the market.
There is a lot of safety data available on vaccines and although there are some rare people who may be allergic to an ingredient in one of the vaccines – which is the case with any medicine – the results show vaccines that are approved for use are safe and effective for for human use.
But how about free speech?
The tech giant says it has already taken over 12 million content from Facebook and Instagram, which contained “misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm.”
And since April, the company has put warning labels on about 50 million content.
Facebook also announced Monday that it will provide US $ 120 million in advertising credits to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), UN agencies and health ministries to help spread the COVID-19 vaccine and preventive health information.
“In 2021, we will focus on supporting health leaders and civil servants in their work to vaccinate billions of people against COVID-19,” Kang-Xing Jin, head of health at Facebook, said in a statement.
Of course, Facebook has not always been so vigilant against misinformation. Studies have shown that the social networking company has been a vehicle for spreading false news and fueling polarization.
But as a result of the pandemic, and especially since the January 6 Capitol riots, the platform has been more open in the fight against misinformation.
Many people may see such movements as an attack on freedom of expression. But the reality is that much of what we see on social media is organized by fake accounts and robots, often created to sow division and spread misinformation.
In fact, a study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University in May last year found that between 45 and 60 percent of Twitter accounts that share information about COVID-19 were probably robots. Many of them were spreading narratives that the US should reopen in the early days of the pandemic blockade.
To put this in perspective, during US and foreign elections, political events and natural disasters, robots usually account for about 10-20% of the discussion.
Social media researcher Jeanna Matthews of Clarkson University in New York last year discussed whether social media platforms like Facebook should take a bigger stand.
“Failure to act has often been justified by concerns about freedom of expression,” she wrote for The Conversation.
“Does freedom of expression include the right to create 100,000 fake accounts for the express purpose of spreading lies, divisions and chaos?”
You can read the full list of COVID-19 claims that Facebook will no longer allow on the platform here (note: some people report that Facebook has not yet released new guidelines for them, so it may be a gradual process).