Facebook owes it to parents to shun anti-vaxxers

The social media big beast could be a real help to new mothers, but instead still publishes false campaigns

In common with many mums of young children, my Facebook feed looks like a badly edited parenting magazine. Ads for bundles of bobbly hand-me-downs vie for space alongside cute baby photos from proud new parents. Then there are dozens of posts from anxious first-time mothers crowdsourcing advice on breastfeeding, weaning – and vaccines. With this last comes trouble.

Back in March, Facebook vowed to crack down on anti-vax propaganda – from pages promoting innocentsounding “natural parenting” styles but spewing out frightening, groundless videos. These orchestrated campaigns pounced on those posts from vulnerable parents, feeding them scaremongering nonsense about what vaccines could do to their babies.

In September, Facebook implemented the technology it had promised. Now, if the algorithm clocks a query about vaccinations, a pop-up signposts the user to World Health Organisation advice.it sounds very responsible, doesn’t it? But has it worked? No. Only last weekend, baby loss charity Tommy’s shared advice about flu vaccines in pregnancy, and was besieged by comments from antivaxxers, telling midwives they had “blood on their hands” and attacking parents who vaccinated their children. It wasn’t until Monday that Tommy’s saw the toxic mess their well-meaning post had spawned, and issued an apology to their 54,000 followers, most of them bereaved parents.

I feel for Tommy’s – a charity whose social media pages are run by working midwives cannot realistically be expected to police comments 24/7. Facebook, however, has the resources to do so. And yet, despite their bold statements about clamping down on anti-vaxxers, they really are not. Instead, as this newspaper’s investigation exposes, they are profiting from them.

As head of content for the parenting app Mush, I’m very familiar with how anti-vaxxers spread their poison. Since the average Mush user is a first-time mother of a young baby, frequently the questions they post are about vaccines – often as innocent as “should I give Calpol after the MMR?”. Anti-vaxxers see these queries as an opportunity to share their, at best, ill-advised and, at worst, dangerous messaging. Some of them are just naive mums who have fallen prey to anti-vax messaging themselves; others are clearly part of more calculated movements.

Mush has a zero-tolerance policy – unlike subjective parenting topics, like how to settle a baby to sleep, we simply don’t allow debate: anti-vaxxers are banned from the app.

Of course, Mush is a smaller community than Facebook, so we have the luxury of being more human. Like Facebook, we have algorithms looking for keywords around vaccinations, but we also have actual people – an inhouse community team – to report anything potentially dodgy.

On top of this, parents who use Mush have a direct line to experts, including midwives, whom they can send questions to. Recent research we conducted showed that mothers are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of contradictory parenting advice they’re bombarded with online, so this is our effort to empower parents to seek out legitimate information, rather than opinions and propaganda.

One problem we share with Facebook is the constant influx of clueless first-time parents joining our universe. Making a strong statement once in a while isn’t enough – new parents, whose thumbs previously wouldn’t have stopped on baby-related content, are ripe for brainwashing, and it’s hard to keep up.

Trustworthy advice about what happens after birth can be lacking. Not gelling with a health visitor can make a family inadvertently go off-grid and miss out on important information, which explains the shocking fact that measles rates are rising.

This is where social media can make a real difference. Huge beasts like Facebook have the means to make an impact and yet, instead, their pockets are being lined by quacks, who in turn are having their pockets lined by naive parents. Ultimately, the problem is that Facebook doesn’t want people to click off their platform, so it encourages the spread of information – and misinformation. If this is their bottom line, they have a responsibility to use their power and reach to protect the health and wellbeing of the social media users of tomorrow: our babies.