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Facebook Social Networks Science

Facebook Says It Plans To Remove Posts With False Vaccine Claims. (nytimes.com) 152

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Facebook said on Monday that it plans to remove posts with erroneous claims about vaccines from across its platform, including taking down assertions that vaccines cause autism or that it is safer for people to contract Covid-19 than to receive the vaccinations. From a report: The social network has increasingly changed its content policies over the past year as the coronavirus has surged. In October, the social network prohibited people and companies from purchasing advertising that included false or misleading information about vaccines. In December, Facebook said it would remove posts with claims that had been debunked by the World Health Organization or government agencies. Monday's move goes further by targeting unpaid posts to the site and particularly Facebook pages and groups. Instead of targeting only misinformation around Covid vaccines, the update encompasses false claims around all vaccines. Facebook said it consulted with the World Health Organization and other leading health institutes to determine a list of false or misleading claims around Covid and vaccines in general. In the past, Facebook had said it would only "downrank," or push lower down in people's News Feeds, misleading or false claims about vaccines, making it more difficult to find such groups or posts. Now posts, pages and groups containing such falsehoods will be removed from the platform entirely. "Building trust and confidence in these vaccines is critical, so we're launching the largest worldwide campaign to help public health organizations share accurate information about Covid-19 vaccines and encourage people to get vaccinated as vaccines become available to them," Kang-Xing Jin, head of health at Facebook, said in a company blog post.
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Facebook Says It Plans To Remove Posts With False Vaccine Claims. More

Facebook Says It Plans To Remove Posts With False Vaccine Claims.

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  • With False Vaccine Claims from Unapproved False Information Sources. There corrected that for you Mark.

    • Re:Facebook Says It Plans To Remove Posts (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Monday February 08, 2021 @03:45PM (#61041250) Homepage

      Next up: Yanking posts reminding people that the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was run by the CDC, because that might discourage people from getting vaccinated.

      • +1 Sad but true
      • even for Facebook? It's painfully obvious they mean run of the mill anti-vaxxer stuff.

        Now, technically you might be right, as an anti-vaxxer spreading lies about vaccines might have also mentioned the Tuskegee Study, and when their account gets banned it's likely they'll take down everything. But you'd need a scanning electron microscope to see the hairs being split there.

        This "all or nothing" attitude is really just a way to avoid engaging with the topic or addressing the issue. We don't do this fo

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by thrasher thetic ( 4566717 )
          These aren't advertisements. Its just people, talking.
          • These aren't people talking. Facebook takes down very few individual posts that people create. The misinformation is created by well-funded organizations that use actors and editors and fancy lighting and all of the other implements of advertisements and then they get forwarded around social media. These are easy to find and track. If you actually wrote your own text status update "Vaccines are bad for you," it's unlikely that it would even get noticed. They find the widely distributed advertisements a

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        Well, when after that happens, that'd be a good time to complain about it.

    • > False Vaccine Claims from Unapproved False Information Sources

      So let me check:

      Correct vaccine claims from unapproved false information sources: OK
      False other claims from unapproved false information sources: OK
      False vaccine claims from approved false information sources: OK
      False vaccine claims from unapproved true information sources: OK
      False vaccine claims from unapproved false confusion sources: OK
      False vaccime claims to unapproved false information drains: OK

      That doesn't sound very effective ... Esp

    • Who is Facebook's Chief of Medicine and how large is their staff? That's what it will take to properly vet medical information on their platform.

  • Cause I'm not sure you wouldn't win at that game, dear Facebook. ;)

  • Who else is old? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Phanatic1a ( 413374 ) on Monday February 08, 2021 @03:45PM (#61041248)

    Remember when people used to say 100% seriously and utterly without irony that "the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"?

    • It still does. There are myriad platforms for people to spout nonsense on. Facebook is not "the net".

    • Re:Who else is old? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 ) on Monday February 08, 2021 @03:57PM (#61041288)

      Remember when people used to say that Facebook's free Facebook-only ISP in India would lead to (only) Indian people being unable to tell the difference between Facebook and the Internet?

    • I do miss the spirit of the old web. And yes, I know my glasses are slightly tinted rose right now but the amount of people cheering it on is bothering. And all censorship issues aside anyway, this won't stem the flow of these arguments. It will only give them ammunition - you'll hear "they wouldn't have to censor us if we were right." I think, as a whole, censorship is an ineffective way to handle this just from an outcome-based perspective.

    • Remember when people used to say 100% seriously and utterly without irony that "the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"?

      This is actually still true but the part that people leave out is that you have to seek another path. These people may or may not seek another path which is their prerogative.

    • The information won't go away (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday February 08, 2021 @04:41PM (#61041468)
      but you'll have to look for it. The goal in getting it off Facebook is to stop people from going down the rabbit hole and turning away from reality.

      The problem with Facebook is two fold:

      a. They give anti-vax nutters an audience to spread their lies and insanity.

      b. They slowly introduce people to conspiracy theories using algorithms designed to keep them engaged.

      That last one is key. Take a regular person who gets their flu shot every year and expose them to an anti-vaxer's blog about Bill Gates microchipping them with the help of Pfizer and they'll go "This person's a loony" and never think about it again.

      But that's now what FB does. FB will start them out with "wellness" influencers, move them onto homeopathy and the like and gradually ease them into the world of anti-vax. FB knows not to show them the crazy stuff right up front, not because they've researched it, but because they wrote an algorithm that says "if I show them this page I get 1 click + 1 ad impression and they stop, but if I show them this chain of pages I get 10 clicks today and 10,000 ad impressions in the following year as they doom scroll".

      That's the power of Facebook and their algorithms.

      BTW, can somebody help me boil the above down into a sentence or two? It's too much to communicate.

    • Obviously it is not censorship when what you are suppressing is disinformation. Obviously you can know what disinformation is because reliable sources tell you. Also we have to kill all disinformation otherwise we will drown in it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        Actually it is enforcing the law in numerous countries where to practice medicine you have to have appropriate qualifications and be registered with a professional body.

        Giving advice about vaccines on Facebook is practising medicine. Put another way if I started mailing false claims about vaccines out to peoples homes I would soon find myself in deep trouble in most developed countries.

        Finally if I actually was a properly registered medical practitioner, making false claims about vaccines would be enough to

    • It does. The internet is not a social media site. Although if you're 12 and all you've ever done is used Instagram and Facebook and get all your news from Twitter I can understand why you may be confused.

  • Much like what K says: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.".

    I think it's always been this way, but the Internet (FB particularly) has enabled "people" to have a voice they would not have otherwise had.

    I appreciate that FB is trying to help silence the dumb, panicky and dangerous posts, but I suppose we will always have it - I don't see it being successful in the long run. It's disheartening knowing this is the case, but I suppose it's good knowing how dumb the gen

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      If i was facebook and actually wanted to help on the matter, i would focus on running news about people stealing the vaccines, "breaking the line" and so forth.
      Specially if you get to get some big scandal like Bill Gates taking it early.
      That would make illiterate people value the thing more and probably want to take it.

  • Now we just need Twitter to follow suit (Score:3)

    by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Monday February 08, 2021 @04:59PM (#61041508)

    If Twitter follows suit then they can remove all the garbage anti-vax posts made by a government politician here in Australia.

  • Good (Score:3)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Monday February 08, 2021 @06:38PM (#61041794)
    Twitter can do it next. The amount of morons on that platform with their smiley face avatars pushing bullshit and lies is unreal.
  • Or do we? We're all absolutely POSITIVE that FB knows what's real and what's fake vaccine news, right?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Facebook Says It Plans To Edit User Content.

    FTFY

    • That is a poor summary, because that's something Facebook has been doing all along. This is about specifics, or at least, more specific than your statement. But I've noticed that you like to produce pat-yet-incorrect summaries, so I guess you're making your par.

  • I quick Facebook about 9 years ago, after a short stint of about 2 years. Aside from the vitriol, I don't feel like I'm missing much besides pictures of people lunches and where they are on vacation.

  • Literally what it says.

    One company who decides what is true and what is false for billions of people. Worse, not merely telling them what their cathedral thinks is true and what isn't, but preventing people from opposing the claim by any means, banning and deleting any dissent and the dissenters themselves. Still worse, it's not even the company cathedral, but the official state one. Therefore, a private company is hard enforcing the official published opinion of the state as the only allowed opinion.

    Expec

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