Facebook under controversy on how to deal with the vaccine issue

As public pressure intensifies over how Facebook promotes misinformation about vaccines, the social media giant is considering removing anti-vaccination content from its recommendation systems.

Facebook has become something of a haven for a small but vocal community of parents who reject facts about immunizations, often citing junk science or conspiracy theories, and opt out of having their children vaccinated.

This week, Facebook has come under fire for promoting anti-vaccination material, especially ads targeting women in regions with high numbers of measles cases, according to reporting from the Daily Beast. The outcry intensified after Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote a letter to founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg asking how Facebook planned to protect users from misleading material about vaccinations. Schiff sent a similar letter to Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, which is also under scrutiny about how its search engine and subsidiary YouTube promote potentially dangerous misinformation.

Click to expand...

boombox4 said:

Censorship. That's the solution, not better PR, education, and more effective outlaying of information. Awesome.

Click to expand...

boombox4 said:

Censorship. That's the solution, not better PR, education, and more effective outlaying of information. Awesome.

Click to expand...

The majority of Facebook ads spreading misinformation about vaccines are funded by two organizations run by well-known anti-vaccination activists, a new study in the journal Vaccine has found.

The World Mercury Project chaired by Robert F Kennedy Jr, and Stop Mandatory Vaccinations, a project of campaigner Larry Cook, bought 54% of the anti-vaccine ads shown on the platform during the study period.

Absolutely we were surprised,” said David Broniatowski, a professor of engineering at George Washington University, one of the authors of the report. “These two individuals were generating the majority of the content.”

Cook uses crowd-funding platforms to raise money for Facebook ads and his personal expenses. The crowd-funding platform GoFundMe banned Cook’s fundraisers in March 2019. YouTube has demonetized Cook’s videos.


Kennedy is the son of the former US attorney general Bobby Kennedy. He also has a nonprofit focused on environmental causes. Kennedy’s brother, sister and niece publicly criticized his “dangerous misinformation” about vaccines in May. They called his work against vaccination, “tragically wrong”.

Click to expand...

RadioPatrol said:

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...ds-facebook-funded-by-two-organizations-study


Here is an Update

Click to expand...

Will_H_69_9 said:

that's pretty sad to know a nephew of a former US president and member of "American political royality" is one of those anti-vaxxer.

Click to expand...

FreddyE1977 said:

Pointing out that there is a profit motive present that could lead people to do bad things
is not engaging in conspiracy theory.

Click to expand...

FreddyE1977 said:

There are reasons to be suspicious of vaccines and vaccine programs.

Pharma companies produce vaccines knowing they will have a guaranteed buyer, thanks to government mandates.
And Congress has exempted them from any and all civil liability resulting from the use of their vaccines.

Pretty sweet deal, eh? Guaranteed sales and nobody can sue you if you screw-up.
So far as I know it's the only product that enjoys complete Federal protection from lawsuits.

When I was a kid there were 6 or 7 vaccines required to attend school. Today in some states there
are over 35. Pharma companies are paying politicians to get new vaccines added to the list. Let's not
kid ourselves.

Pointing out that there is a profit motive present that could lead people to do bad things
is not engaging in conspiracy theory.

Click to expand...

Will_H_69_9 said:

that's pretty sad to know a nephew of a former US president and member of "American political royality" is one of those anti-vaxxer.

Click to expand...

Hawaii’s Green, a family physician with emergency room training, has deployed on previous medical missions around the world. At a hospital on the western side of the island, he said the facility was operating at 600 percent above capacity because of so many sick patients.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Green said in an interview with Radio New Zealand last week. “It was unbelievable the extent to which people were devastated by measles, with the rash all over their body and high fevers.”

Green condemned misinformation spread by anti-vaccine activists in Samoa and from outside the island. Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a nephew of President John F. Kennedy, visited the island in June and met with an Australian Samoan anti-vaccine activist. Both the activist and Kennedy said they met by chance in Samoa while staying at the same resort in June.


Kennedy has also written to the government of Samoa questioning the safety of the MMR vaccine.

Hawaii’s Green said in the radio interview that misinformation aimed at scaring people was “unacceptable.” He added: “I believe in free speech, but I don’t believe in denying science. … To send anti-vax messages from another country is really quite terrible unless those individuals are willing to come here and suffer with the measles and see their own children get sick or die.”

Click to expand...

The number of people killed in Samoa's measles outbreak has reached 53, with almost 4,000 cases reported in total.

Health Ministry statistics show that 48 of the dead are children below the age of five.

Although measles deaths worldwide have fallen sharply since the 1960s, the World Health Organization has warned of a comeback around the world since 2017.

Samoa's low vaccination rates are in part due to the deaths in 2018 of two children given a wrongly-mixed vaccine.

Should vaccinations be compulsory?
How anti-vaccine movements threaten global health
Measles is a highly contagious illness that causes coughing, rashes and fever.

Although effective and safe vaccination is available, even some developed countries have seen a resurgence in recent years.

The rise is - in part - due to some parents shunning vaccines for philosophical or religious reasons, or concerns, debunked by medical science, that vaccines are linked to autism.

Click to expand...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) - Dr. Nicole Baldwin, a Cincinnati pediatrician, says her growing concern about what she called misleading anti-vaccine social media posts led her to publish an upbeat message about the benefits of childhood vaccinations.

The video posted on Tiktok, a platform for short form mobile videos, has now been seen by close to 1.5 million people, and in the process, has generated considerable venom from those who believe that childhood vaccinations are dangerous.

“I have been the subject of a tsunami of negative comments on all of my social media, there have been negative, fraudulent rumors,” Dr. Baldwin told CBS News.

Dr. Baldwin has been called “public enemy #1” and someone else posted that “dead doctors don’t lie” and has been the subject of phone calls that threaten to shut her practice down, and others who have taken to posting negative reviews about her practice.

Click to expand...

anotherguy said:

Facebook or You Tube could be sued as well. This is worse than the Alex Jones's garbage. There should be one rule: If it endangers lives, ban it.

Click to expand...

anotherguy said:

I'm waiting for a group of parents who have a child that dies to sue some of the anti-vaxxers, which is what they deserve, and Facebook or You Tube could be sued as well. This is worse than the Alex Jones's garbage. There should be one rule: If it endangers lives, ban it.

Click to expand...