Tue 13 October 2020:
The blog post also outlined the platform’s plans to direct people with general information about the flu vaccine and how to get it, using its “Preventive Health” tool.
Facebook, which has been under pressure from politicians and public health groups to crack down on anti-vaccine content and misinformation on its platform, said that although a COVID-19 vaccine would not be available for some time, the pandemic had highlighted the importance of preventive health behaviours.
Facebook said Tuesday it is launching a new global policy that bans ads that discourage people from getting vaccines. The company previously had a policy against vaccine hoaxes that were publicly identified by global health organizations.
“Now, if an ad explicitly discourages someone from getting a vaccine, we’ll reject it,” the company’s head of health, Kang-Xing Jin, and its director of product management, Rob Leathern, said in a blog post Tuesday.
Facebook said it would begin to enforce the new policy in the next few days.
“Our goal is to help messages about the safety and efficacy of vaccines reach a broad group of people, while prohibiting ads with misinformation that could harm public health efforts,” the company said.
“We already don’t allow ads with vaccine hoaxes that have been publicly identified by leading global health organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),” it added.
The blog post also outlined the platform’s plans to direct people with general information about the flu vaccine and how to get it, using its “Preventive Health” tool.
It also said it’s working with the World Health Organization and UNICEF “on public health messaging campaigns to increase immunization rates.”
Earlier this year, Facebook Public Policy Manager Jason Hirsch told Reuters news agency the company believed users should be able to express such personal views and that more aggressive censorship could push people hesitant about vaccines towards the anti-vaccine camp.
However, at least one researcher suggested Facebook’s move is a case of too little, too late.
“I think a lot vaccine [hesitancy] researchers know the potential that Facebook has to promote vaccine hesitancy,” said Kolina Koltai, a vaccine researcher at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington.
“This is one step in the correct direction but still there is much work to be done to correct the damage that has already been done.” Moreover, Koltai pointed out that there’s still a lot of vaccine-hesitant content in groups and pages.
