Years of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories found a welcome home on Facebook. The social network saw the problem as a matter of freedom of speech and the anti-vaxxer groups that organized it as about as dangerous as flat-Earthers. But now that getting accurate vaccine information to the public is an issue of existential importance, Facebook says it is launching an unprecedented campaign to completely remove false claims on the subject.
In a blog post On Monday, Facebook wrote many words praising its efforts to provide accurate vaccine information to the few billion people who use its products. Among all those congratulations was a brief note about the introduction of stricter policies to combat the spread of vaccines. Kang-Xing Jin, Facebook’s head by hhealth, writes:
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. Today, after consulting with leading health organizations, including WHO, we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional disproved claims about COVID-19 and vaccines. Read more about how we are combating COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation.
This was no sudden move but it will likely open the platform to new levels of moderation chaos and furious users. In 2019, Facebook swore pages and groups that “spread vaccine misinformation in News Feed and Search” and said it would reject ads spreading vaccine misinformation. It also said it would remove targeted ad categories such as “vaccine controversies” to remind everyone that Facebook did indeed have a special category for this stuff.
As the anti-vaxxer trend turned into something resembling a social movement, the Covid-19 pandemic overwhelmed the world and it became clear that this issue was more than a measles resurgence. In December, Facebook said it would begin removing messages specifically spreading false information about the covid-19 vaccines. Today’s move is going all the way. T.he company claims it will remove all vaccine-related misinformation falls within the criteria founded by Facebook in partnership with the “World Health Organization (WHO), government health authorities and stakeholders from across the spectrum of people using our service.”
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The banned content list contains clear items such as claims that “vaccines cause autism” or “vaccines cause the disease they are intended to protect against.” Those points should be fairly easy to maintain, but critics are already expressing concern about some of the more difficult rules. Journalist and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci pointed out on Twitter that different rules could lead to legitimate research being flagged by Facebook as false, as our knowledge about covid-19 and related vaccines continues to evolve.
Even if all the rules are rigorous to target only the content that Facebook doesn’t want, we have too many examples showing that the social network is bad at enforcing its own policies, and its automated disposal systems fail all too often. Today only has the BBC reported in the case of a photographer in England whose work has been rejected on at least seven separate occasions by Facebook’s ad algorithm. Examples of rejected photos included a fireworks display blocked for ‘promoting weapons’ and a photo of a humble cow in a bleak field labeled ‘overtly sexual’.
Do we absolutely need Facebook as a vital space for scientists to share preliminary vaccine information? That seems debatable. Do we need the freedom to share openly sexual photos of cows? Absolutely. As with all matters of moderation and censorship, you need to be careful what you wish for.