After indicating that it was exploring its choices for fighting the possibly deadly rise of anti-vaccination content on its platform last month, Facebook is creating a plan of attack.
Facebook’s strategy in the effort is to both minimize the unfolding of vaccination misinformation and to point users faraway
from inaccurate anti-vaccination propaganda and toward “authoritative information,” i.e. data verified by the health and scientific institution.
To achieve a reduction within
the unfold of
anti-vax propaganda,
Facebook will downrank groups and pages that unfold this sort of content
across both News Feed
and its search function.
Facebook also will reject
ads promoting anti-vaccination misinformation.
Repeat offenders making an attempt to push this content through
ads may see their
accounts disabled. On Instagram, Facebook “won’t show or suggest content that
contains misinformation regarding vaccinations on Instagram
Explore or hashtag pages,” effectively burying that content from public-facing areas. Facebook noted that it’d also take away anti-vax
adjacent ad targeting descriptors as
well as the term “vaccine controversies.”
Facebook’s role in the rise of anti-vaccination or “anti-vax” conspiracy
theories came into the spotlight last month. In light of reporting pointing to the responsibility of
Facebook and YouTube in spreading this particularly dangerous type of misinformation, prominent California Rep. Adam Schiff wrote to the 2 companies demanding “additional info on the steps that you just presently take to provide medically accurate information on
vaccinations to your users.”
Last month, Bloomberg reported that Facebook was
“exploring further measures
to best combat the matter,” as well as “reducing or removing this kind of content from
recommendations, as well as groups you ought to join,
and demoting it in search results, whereas also making certain that higher quality and more authoritative info is accessible.”
Like other dangerous sorts
of online misinformation, the prevalence of
anti-vax content has destructive real-world
implications. The U.S. is presently experiencing an outbreak of measles, a completely preventable infectious disease that’s threatening
the health of kids and
vulnerable populations and creating broad school closures in places like
Clark County, Wash.
When Facebook directs its attention toward
reducing the general public unfolds of a specific strain of conspiracy
theory or otherwise pernicious content, it tends to do a reasonably thorough
job. The matter after all is that such efforts
from Facebook and other major tech platforms stay reactionary instead of proactive, which means that Facebook’s next
major outbreak of
harmful, even deadly algorithmically fueled misinformation is probably going just around the corner.