For years, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories I found a welcome home on Facebook. The social network saw the issue as free speech and anti-vaxxer groups it hosted as dangerous as paid lands. But now that providing the public with accurate information about the vaccine is a matter of existential importance, Facebook says it is launching an unprecedented campaign to completely eliminate false claims about the subject.
In a blog post On Monday, Facebook wrote a lot of words supporting its efforts to provide accurate information about the vaccine to the two billion people who use its products. Included in all that self-congratulations was a brief note on the implementation of stricter policies to combat vaccine information. Kang-Xing Jin, Facebookead of hhealth, write:
In addition to exchanging reliable information, we are expanding our efforts to eliminate false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and, in general, during the pandemic. Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the WHO, we are expanding the list of false claims that we will remove to include additional disappointed claims about COVID-19 and vaccines. Learn more about how we are control of COVID-19 and misinformation of the vaccine.
This was not a sudden move, but it is likely to open the platform to new levels of moderation chaos and annoy users. In 2019, Facebook to swear to drop pages and groups that “spread vaccination misinformation in News Feed and Search” and said it would reject ads that spread vaccination misinformation. He also said that he will eliminate the categories of targeted ads, such as “vaccine controversies”, reminding everyone that yes, Facebook has a special category for these things.
As the anti-vaxxer trend turned into something like a social movement, the covid-19 pandemic overwhelmed the globe and it became clear that this problem was more than a resurgence of measles. In December, Facebook said it would begin removing posts pushing false information about covid-19 vaccines in particular. Today’s movement goes all the way. Tthe company supports it will eliminate all misinformation related to the vaccine that falls within the criteria established by Facebook in coordination with the “World Health Organization (WHO), government health authorities and stakeholders across the spectrum of people who use our service.”
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The list of banned content includes simple articles, such as the statements that “vaccines cause autism” or “vaccines cause the disease against which they are intended to protect”. These points should be fairly easy to apply, but critics are already raising concerns about some of the more complicated rules. Journalist and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci Highlighted on Twitter the fact that more rules could lead to legitimate research being marked as false by Facebook, while our knowledge about covid-19 and related vaccines continues to evolve.
Even though all the rules have been developed to target only content that Facebook does not want, we have too many examples that show that the social network is terrible in enforcing its own policies, and its automatic disposal systems fail too often. Today, The BBC reported in the case of a photographer in England whose work was rejected by the Facebook advertising algorithm on at least seven different occasions. Examples of rejected photos included a fireworks display that was blocked for “promoting weapons” and shooting a base cow in a gloomy field that was labeled “obviously sexual.”
Do we absolutely need Facebook as a living space for scientists to share preliminary information about the vaccine? It seems debatable. Do we need the freedom to share obviously sexual photos of cows? Absolute. As with all things moderation and censorship, pay attention to what you want.