Facebook on Monday announced a major restriction on the distribution of what the tech giant considers “false claims” about COVID-19 and vaccines.
In the future, the company will remove all misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines from its platform, including claims that the virus was manufactured in a lab, that vaccines are ineffective in preventing disease, that it is safer to get the disease than the vaccine, and that vaccines are generally toxic, dangerous, or cause autism.
“In addition to sharing reliable information, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic,” said Kang-Xing Jin, chief of health. from the company. said in a newsroom update. “Today, after consulting with leading health organizations, including WHO, we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about COVID-19 and vaccines.”
The full list of false claims that can now be removed is on the Facebook Help Center web page. It broadly encompasses any content that downplays the seriousness of COVID-19 or discourages good health practices, such as wearing a mask.
“We will start enforcing this policy immediately, with a particular focus on pages, groups and accounts that violate these rules, and we will continue to expand our enforcement in the coming weeks,” wrote Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity. Groups, pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram that repeatedly share these invalidated claims can be removed altogether.
Rosen added that the company plans to access credible information through “promot[ing] relevant, authoritative results “when people search for vaccine or coronavirus-related content on the platform.
He noted that content monitoring related to the coronavirus pandemic has been going on since December, but now the list of false claims has expanded.
However, the move marks a significant departure from previous actions. In the past, as the New York Times reported, the company has chosen to “down rank” misinformation about the coronavirus, or push the content lower in people’s news feeds. But now the company is taking action by removing such content altogether.
According to the newsroom update, the new move is in response to a ruling by the company’s Oversight Board, which found the rules and standards for health-related misinformation to be “inappropriately vague.”
The news comes as Facebook and other major social media companies are under intense scrutiny for their censorship practices. If the new action is any indication, it seems that Facebook has no intention of aggressively suppressing content.