Facebook is to ban proven false claims about COVID-19 vaccines, but warns it will “not be able to start enforcing these policies overnight”.
The change to the company’s policies follows the UK becoming the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for public use.
It follows months of criticisms of Facebook, alongside other social media platforms, for what some have perceived to be their inadequate response to false information during the coronavirus pandemic.
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Back in May, the chair of the parliament’s DCMS select committee, Julian Knight, claimed there were “record levels of misinformation and disinformation online about COVID-19, some of it deadly”.
Facebook argued that it has been aggressively responding to harmful posts about the pandemic, and in a news post on Thursday from Kang-Xing Jin, the company’s head of health, it announced it was increasing the range of information it would be removing.
“Given the recent news that COVID-19 vaccines will soon be rolling out around the world, over the coming weeks we will also start removing false claims about these vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts on Facebook and Instagram,” the company said.
These false claims that have been debunked include science-fiction ideas that the vaccines contain microchips, or that the COVID-19 pandemic was actually being caused by 5G.
Earlier this year Sky News found groups on Facebook calling for the harassment of 5G engineers and celebrating criminal damage to mobile phone masts.
“We will also remove conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines that we know today are false: like specific populations are being used without their consent to test the vaccine’s safety,” the company added.
However it warned: “We will not be able to start enforcing these policies overnight.”