Facebook may hide anti-vax posts
Facebook is considering making anti-vaccination content on its site less visible, amid a measles outbreak in the US.
The social media giant, which has been criticised for spreading fake news, said yesterday it had ‘‘taken steps to reduce the distribution of health-related misinformation on Facebook, but we know we have more to do’’.
Facebook said this might look like ‘‘reducing or removing this type of content from recommendations, including Groups You Should Join, and demoting it in search results, while also ensuring that higher-quality and more authoritative information is available’’.
The response follows a letter from California Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff partly blaming Facebook and Instagram for spreading false information about vaccine safety.
Right after the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook introduced changes to stop fake information spreading on its service, including making it easier for people to report hoaxes, and for fact-checking organisations to flag fake articles. In August 2018, it introduced reputation scores for users to flag fake articles and weed out malicious actors who abuse the system.
Fears of misinformation have grown as more people use social media to consume news.
A recent investigation by The Guardian found that Facebook search results for vaccines were ‘‘dominated by anti-vaccination propaganda’’. A recent study by the Credibility Coalition and Health Feedback, a group of scientists who evaluate the accuracy of health media coverage, found that the majority of the most-clicked health stories on Facebook in 2018 were fake or contained a significant amount of misleading information.
Health-related information on Facebook is eligible for factchecking through the social network’s partners certified through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network. Content found to be misleading or false will be demoted in users’ feeds and appear along with related articles from fact checkers. But this doesn’t work in Facebook’s groups, where the bulk of antivaccination material is spread.
People choosing not to vaccinate have become a global health threat in 2019, the World Health Organisation says. The US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) says the number of American children who are not being vaccinated by 24 months old has been gradually increasing.
Some parents opt not to vaccinate because of the discredited belief that vaccines are linked to autism. The CDC has said there is no link, and that there are no ingredients in vaccines that could cause autism.
Currently, an anti-vaccination hotspot in Washington state is battling a measles outbreak that has been declared a public health emergency. More than 50 people have been infected, mostly unvaccinated children. The state is also considering a bill that would remove parents’ ability to refuse the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine for their school-age children.
– USA Today, Washington Post