Facebook will try to reduce anti-vaccination pages on both Facebook and Instagram content.
According today's Facebook announcement, the company will run a new action plan to combat misinformation around vaccinations. The beginning will be by downgrading the ranking of groups and pages that spread false information about vaccines so they appear less in Facebok News Feed. And in Instagram respectively, the company will prevent the presence of anti-vaccination content in Instagram Explore and hashtag pages.
Facebook's intended crackdown is to make these pages harder to find. Vaccines will be excluded from recommendations and will not appear as recommended when typing in the line search on Facebook. Ads that contain misinformation about vaccinations will be rejected.
According to Facebok, this campaign will build on the experience of the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help identify which pages spread the truth and which disseminate fantasies about vaccines. These organizations have identified pages of jokes and common misconceptions about vaccines.
Facebook is the latest social network to take no action on vaccinations. Last month, the Pinterest took steps to prevent relevant content from appearing on searching results, and YouTube began blocking anti-vaccine advertising channels.
