Both Facebook and Google promised U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff to work harder to protect their users from misleading anti-vaccine posts that frightened some parents out of immunizing their children against preventable and potentially fatal diseases.
The test, says Schiff, D-Calif., who wrote to the two companies and Seattle-based Amazon requesting information on how they handle such posts, will be whether they deliver on their commitments.
“I plan to continue working with the companies on the issue of misinformation on their platforms and monitoring the effectiveness of the changes they are making because our health, and particularly the health of our children, is at stake,” he said Thursday.
Platforms operated by the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social media giant and search engine provider Google have displayed and sometimes recommended posts and sites that discourage parents from obtaining immunization shots for their children.
Doctors and scientists, however, “are in overwhelming consensus that vaccines are both effective and safe,” Schiff, whose party wields increased power after regaining control of the House of Representatives in November’s mid-term elections, told the companies in February.
[Read more: Teen who defied mother to get vaccinated tells Congress there are not two sides to the issue]
Schiff’s suggestion that social media and search engines are encouraging high-risk behavior illustrates the growing concern from both major U.S. political parties about the potential misuse of tech-based services that reach billions of people, but lack the vetting provided in the past by news media and other publishers and broadcasters.
U.S. intelligence agencies, for instance, chided Silicon Valley for failing to detect and prevent posts from foreign intelligence agencies intended to sway voters in the 2016 presidential election. Republican lawmakers have argued since that efforts to fight such influence campaigns have included willful suppression of conservative views, a claim their executives have denied.
Promoting the anti-vaccine movement, meanwhile, may pose an even more tangible and immediate risk, while threatening a far broader segment of the population than the people who opt out of immunization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in 2017.
“Anything discouraging parents from vaccinating their children against vaccine-preventable diseases is concerning,” Karan Bhatia, Google’s vice president for public policy, wrote in a Feb. 25 letter to Schiff. “We have put a lot of effort into curbing misinformation in our products — from better search-ranking algorithms, to improving our ability to surface authoritative content, to tougher policies against monetization of harmful or dangerous content.”
Google’s YouTube video platform is already “demonetizing anti-vaccination content” under its policy prohibiting harmful or dangerous advertising, Bhatia wrote.
In late January, YouTube rolled out a software update that reduced automatic recommendations — which are based on a user’s previously-viewed videos — of borderline content or harmfully-misleading posts “such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming that the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11,” Bhatia added. “This update includes reducing recommendations of certain types of anti-vaccination videos.”
Diseases largely eradicated by vaccines — such as measles, which caused the deaths of hundreds of Americans a year, and rubella, which killed 15,000 U.S. residents in 1921 — can return without proper prevention, the CDC has said.
Japan’s experience with whooping cough is just one example. In 1974, when about 80 percent of the country’s children were vaccinated for the disease, there were only 393 cases and no deaths, the CDC said. After vaccination rates dwindled to 10 percent, just five years later, more than 13,000 people contracted whooping cough, 41 of whom died.
According to the World Health Organization, the reluctance or refusal to obtain vaccinations despite their availability is one of the top threats to global health in 2019. Vaccination, which currently prevents 2 million to 3 million deaths a year, could stop another 1.5 million if more people took advantage, the agency said.
“Because misinformation about health topics can be especially harmful, we have been working to do more in this area, in particular,” Kevin Martin, Facebook’s vice president of public policy, wrote in a March 7 letter to Schiff. The company will use information from both the CDC and the World Health Organization to identify “verifiable hoaxes” such as the claim that vaccines can cause autism, he wrote.
Facebook will work to exclude groups and posts with misleading vaccine information from its computer-generated recommendations to users, while adjusting algorithms on photo-sharing platform Instagram to weed such content out of “Instagram Explore” or hashtag pages.
“We are also taking additional steps to address hoaxes related to vaccines in advertising,” Martin wrote. “We are investing in systems to better ensure that ads that include this type of misinformation about vaccines be rejected. We are also removing a number of ad-targeting options, such as ‘vaccine controversies,’ that might have been used to help spread this sort of misinformation.”
[Also read: Vaccination controversy puts politicians on the spot]
