Facebook Will Label All Posts About Covid-19 Vaccines

Top social media platform, Facebook, announced Monday that it will begin to label posts discussing the coronavirus vaccination with a pointer to official information about COVID-19.

This is coming after the company faced heavy criticism from researchers and lawmakers for allowing vaccine misinformation to spread on its platforms.

Facebook announced in a blog post that it implemented some new “temporary” measures aimed at limiting the spread of vaccine misinformation/combating vaccine hesitancy — saying it’s reducing the distribution of content from users that have violated its policies on COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation; or “that have repeatedly shared content debunked as False or Altered by our third-party fact-checking partners”.

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Facebook and Instagram, which recently tightened their policies after long taking a hands-off approach to vaccine misinformation, remain home to large accounts, pages, and groups that promote false claims about the shots and can be easily found through keyword searches

The blog post also announced a reduction in the distribution of any COVID-19 or vaccine content that fact-checking partners have rated as “Missing Context”.

Facebook's Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said that the company had taken viral false claims "very seriously" but said there was "a huge grey area of people who have concerns... some of which some people would call misinformation and some of which other people would call doubt". "The best thing to do in that huge grey area is just to show up with authoritative information in a helpful way, be a part of the conversation and do it with health experts," he added.

Admins for groups where either the admins or members have violated the company's COVID-19 policies will be required to temporarily approve all posts within their group, Facebook said. However, it is still clear what happens if a group only has one admin and they have violated its policies.

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Facebook will also “further elevate information from authoritative sources when people seek information about COVID-19 or vaccines”, it added.

The company said it was labeling Facebook and Instagram posts that discuss the safety of COVID-19 vaccines with text saying the vaccines go through safety and effectiveness tests before approval. In the blog post, it also said that since expanding its list of banned false claims about the coronavirus and vaccines in February, it has removed an additional 2 million pieces of content from Facebook and Instagram

Facebook said it had also implemented temporary measures including reducing the reach of content from users who repeatedly share content marked false by fact-checkers.

“We’re continuing to expand our efforts to address COVID-19 vaccine misinformation by adding labels to Facebook and Instagram posts that discuss the vaccines,” Facebook said in the Newsroom post today.

“These labels contain credible information about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines from the World Health Organization. For example, we’re adding a label on posts that discuss the safety of COVID-19 vaccines that notes COVID-19 vaccines go through tests for safety and effectiveness before they’re approved.”