Facebook has finally decided to remove anti-vaxxer claims – a full year into a pandemic – but the measures are only temporary.
The social network has finally decided to remove anti-vaxxer claims – a full year into a pandemic
Whenever my local council posts anything about Covid-19 or vaccines to its Facebook page, one guy comments with lies and stupidity about the jab not being tested and other anti-vaxxer nonsense about 5G and Bill Gates.
The comments always stay up. The council is either too lacking in tech nous to delete them or just can’t be bothered. Even when I report them, Facebook does nothing. We’re in a pandemic with mass vaccination the only route for escape, and we’re still letting this bogus propaganda stand.
But not for long. Facebook has finally caught up with the daily news headlines from 2020 and declared it will remove dangerous vaccine misinformation. At the end of last year, Facebook started to remove Covid-related lies, telling users they’d been shown incorrect information. Now, the list of content that’s no longer tolerated has been extended to include false claims that vaccines aren’t at all effective, that they’re less safe than Covid-19 itself and that they can cause autism. All of those things are untrue, just to be clear.
Why Facebook took so long to ban posts that are dangerous to public health is beyond any comprehension, although it’s also bewildering that so many people still get their medical advice from a site originally designed to help college students hook up. For a company that once had the internal motto of “move fast and break things”, Mark Zuckerberg’s website sure is slow to fix them.
To be fair, it’s not easy moderating health information. After all, free speech is important and we should treat pharmaceutical companies with suspicion. While an awful lot of misinformation about vaccines is spread online, there are genuine questions that are worthy of debate.
Zeynep Tufekci, a researcher at the University of North Carolina who has emerged as an excellent source of sanity during the pandemic, notes that Facebook will be banning statements that claim the vaccines aren’t tested against a placebo during trials. That’s oddly specific and, as she points out, there actually was a trial that didn’t include placebos. It’s also worth noting that Facebook is banning claims that Covid-19 vaccines aren’t effective, even though of course some aren’t against certain variants.
Other posts are less problematic. For example, Facebook says it will take down claims that the vaccines “contain the mark of the beast”. Then there’s the inexplicably ongoing theory that vaccines contain a 5G chip that will be used to control our minds. If Big Tech could do that, why would they bother with advertising? Perhaps Facebook could have started by tackling easy targets like these bonkers claims at the outbreak of the pandemic, and then with more consideration moved onto the thornier, grey-area issues.
Of course, anti-vaxxer nonsense isn’t new to Facebook. Thanks to discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield and his garbage “study” that was later retracted, plenty of people think vaccines cause autism (they don’t). But Facebook has left those claims on its site to rot brains. Now we’re paying for it, trying to convince people who are wary of vaccines to accept quickly tested ones using newly developed technologies after they’ve heard lies about them for years.
There’s one more problem with Facebook’s measures: they’re temporary. When this crisis is over, it’s going to stop enforcing these rules and return to the status quo, ensuring we have the same challenge when the next pandemic hits.
If you think this doesn’t matter, allow me to share my experience of volunteering at a vaccine clinic. I’ve chatted with a daughter who refused to go in and support her mother getting the jab because she doesn’t believe in vaccines; it was clear from their interactions they’d been arguing about it in the car journey. I don’t know that Facebook is why she believes what she does, but it certainly contributes to the problem. And this issue has repercussions here in the real world. We accept that terrorists can be brainwashed online and delete sites hosting such dangerous material, so why is the same not done for health information? After the past year, how can anyone deny that it’s important?
People have the right to think what they want, even if it’s incorrect and potentially dangerous. But as a company liable for how people use its products, Facebook has a duty of care and responsibility to do better. It’s no wonder that regulation of social sites is looming in the US and continues to be considered in the UK. Hopefully lawmakers have learned to move faster than Facebook’s leadership.
It’s bewildering that so many people still get their medical advice from a website originally designed to help college students hook up
As a company liable for how people use its products, Facebook has a duty of care and a responsibility to do better