“We have removed this account for repeatedly sharing disproved claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” a spokesperson for Instagram owner Facebook, said in a statement.
Kennedy, the son of the late US Attorney General, US Senator and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, has repeatedly spoken out against vaccines. He has lobbied Congress to give parents exemptions from state requirements requiring them to vaccinate their children. However, the lifelong Democrat downplays his anti-vaccine stances by saying he is actually in favor of safe vaccines and noting that all of 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 spokesperson said there were no plans to remove that page “at this time.”
Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit Kennedy-chairs group that is skeptical about the health benefits of vaccines, said it could not immediately respond to Instagram’s actions.
Facebook has struggled for years to tackle misinformation about vaccines and earlier this week announced another attempt to do so.
On Monday, the company announced several ways to combat vaccine misinformation, including making it harder to find accounts through Instagram-owned searches on Facebook that discourage people from getting vaccinated.
The announcement comes a day after CNN Business reported that Instagram continued to feature anti-vaxxer accounts prominently in search results, while Facebook groups that denounce vaccines remained easy to find. The findings raised concern among public health experts as the United States embarks on the largest ever vaccine rollout to address the coronavirus pandemic.