Amazon removing books with false vaccine information
YouTube said it was banning anti-vaccination videos from running online advertisements.
Facebook announced that it was hiding certain content and turning away ads that contain misinformation about vaccines, and Pinterest said it was blocking “polluted” search terms, memes and pins from particular sites prompting antivaccine propaganda, according to news reports.
Now Amazon has joined the other companies in navigating the line between doing business and censoring it, in an age when, experts say, misleading claims about health and science have a real effect on public health.
NBC News recently reported that Amazon was pulling books touting false information about autism “cures” and vaccines. The ecommerce giant confirmed Monday to the Washington Post that several books are no longer available but would not release more specific information.
Experts say these companies are being tasked with new and challenging responsibilities.
Art Caplan, a professor of bioethics and head of the division of medical ethics at New York University School of Medicine, said companies cannot allow themselves to be “vehicles for misinformation contagion.”
“You can certainly post things that oppose vaccination — individuals can speak their minds. But when you have websites that are presenting false information, debunked information or, similarly, books that tout phony cures, I think there is a role for somebody in censorship,” Caplan said.
Caplan said it is important for companies to censor such misinformation “because the power of social media, particularly in the vaccine space, is so strong that it’s leading to fear of vaccines, which is leading to epidemics, which is putting people at risk.”
The anti-vaccine movement has been sustained, in part, by fraudulent research from 1998 that purported to show a link between a preservative used in vaccines and autism — despite numerous studies that have provided conclusive evidence that vaccinations do not cause autism.
False anti-vaccine claims continue to sweep the internet, prompting concern from public health experts, lawmakers and parents who are not able to get their children vaccinated because of medical conditions and rely on others to do so.
The World Health Organization has named “vaccine hesitancy” one of the “10 threats to global health in 2019.”
Joe Holt, a business ethics professor at the University of Notre Dame, said the problem with businesses being forced to play a censorship role is that most of them, if not all of them, probably never intended to do that. But now, he said, “there’s more and more external pressure for them to do more censoring.”
Over the past couple months, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has been calling on companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon to address anti-vaccine claims on their respective platforms.
Schiff announced March 1 that he had sent a letter to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO and the owner of the Washington Post, to express concern that the company “is surfacing and recommending products and content that discourage parents from vaccinating their children, a direct threat to public health, and reversing progress made in tackling vaccine-preventable diseases.”
On March 7, Schiff said in a statement that “I’m pleased that all three companies are taking this issue seriously and acknowledged their responsibility to provide quality health information to their users.”