Although Facebook doesn’t allow posts that falsely claim the COVID-19 vaccines “kill or seriously harm people,” first-person testimonials are allowed to live on the platform because they are “personal experiences or anecdotes.” The effect of a negative rating is a demotion in News Feed and in some cases a warning label. Those viral videos surfaced through Facebook’s fact-checking partnership with PolitiFact. ( Public health officials say there’s no evidence to suggest such a connection.) Other users have made unproven claims that the vaccines caused them to shake and convulse. In December, when vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were approved for emergency use, videos emerged on Facebook claiming to show a nurse passing out after getting a shot (even though she gets dizzy with any kind of pain) and a nurse saying she developed Bell’s Palsy (even though there was no record of such a reaction in Tennessee). Some of the most popular anti-vaccine posts are first-person testimonials about purported side effects. “Our enforcement isn’t perfect, which is why we’re always improving it while also working with outside experts to make sure that our policies remain in the right place,” McAlister said. Facebook’s moderation policies, including those that prohibit misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, are independent of its fact-checking program.įacebook’s rules against COVID-19 vaccine misinformation were created to address the most extreme cases of misinformation: claims that the vaccine kills you, causes autism or infertility, changes your DNA or “turns you into a monkey.” After we sent Facebook the posts we found about a “pharmacovigilance tracking system” and 5G nanoparticles, the company removed them for violating its policies against COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation.īut that kind of enforcement has been uneven. alone that fact-check false and misleading claims on Facebook, a program that began in December 2016. PolitiFact is one of 10 news organizations in the U.S. ( Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) Unless the posts violate other policies, they remain on the platform. When we rate a post as false or misleading, Facebook reduces its reach in the News Feed and alerts users who shared it. PolitiFact fact-checked those posts as part of its partnership with Facebook to combat false news and misinformation. There are nanoparticles in the COVID-19 vaccine that will help people “locate you” via 5G networks.“If you take the vaccine, you’ll be enrolled in a pharmacovigilance tracking system.” ( False).The COVID-19 vaccine could lead to prion diseases, Alzheimer’s, ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases.What Facebook promisedįrom the outset of the pandemic, Facebook promised a tough approach to coronavirus misinformation - one that didn’t solely rely on findings from its third-party fact-checking partners, including PolitiFact.īut Americans who logged on to Facebook and Instagram, its sister platform, over the past few months may still have seen posts that appear to violate those terms. “People often say things that aren’t verifiably true, but that speak to their lived experiences, and I think we have to be careful restricting that,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a March 25 House hearing. The result is that many types of false or exaggerated claims against vaccines are allowed to remain on the platform.Īs Facebook faces criticism from both parties in Congress, it is reluctant to take additional action that could be seen as a violation of free speech. “The pages we’ve seen spreading these myths … they are pages that have been spreading health misinformation in most cases for years.”įacebook’s strategy for tamping down misinformation about vaccines is to single out certain categories of anti-vaccine claims, rather than taking a broad approach. “It doesn’t take an advanced, opaque algorithm like Facebook likes to use to predict this behavior,” said John Gregory, deputy health editor at NewsGuard, a firm that tracks online misinformation. We reached out to Earthley for a comment, but we haven’t heard back. The page has published out-of-context news stories about vaccine side effects and skirted moderation by misspelling the word “vaccine” in posts questioning whether vaccination is safe.
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