February 8, 2021
Facebook has been historically resistant to monitoring any more content than they deem strictly necessary, but times are changing. The case could be made that Facebook is the world’s single largest depository of misinformation, and given how much that misinformation has divided a nation along partisan and epistemological lines, Zuckerberg el al. are feeling pressure to act. And they’re doing so about vaccine misinformation.
Facebook has been removing posts with misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine for a while, but now they’re expanding the policy to include misinformation about all vaccines. The company worked with the World Health Organization to determine a list of the most common vaccine myths on social media, and plans to flag any and all such posts for the bin. In the past, Facebook pushed anti-vaxx content down further on the feed as a way of dealing with false or misleading posts — now it looks like such posts will disappear altogether.