Facebook announced a litany of different steps designed to combat vaccine misinformation.
The social media platform revealed in a blog post on Monday that it will be “expanding” efforts to remove false or misleading posts on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19 and vaccines. In providing accurate data to inform effective vaccine delivery, the company said it hopes to instill public confidence in COVID-19 vaccines and help people find vaccination sites.
“Health officials and health authorities are in the early stages of trying to vaccinate the world against COVID-19, and experts agree that rolling this out successfully is going to be helping build confidence in vaccines,” said Kang-Xing Jin, Facebook’s head of health, according to NPR.
In the blog post, the platform, which noted it had consulted with leading health experts, including the World Health Organization, said it had deleted “more than 12 million pieces of content on Facebook and Instagram containing misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm.”
In response to charges that social media platforms are a hotbed of misinformation, Facebook created a policy last December to remove posts containing claims about coronavirus vaccines “that have been debunked by public health experts.” The Silicon Valley giant also established an oversight board in 2018 designed to curate which posts can be subject to censorship. It issued its first judgments last week.
Facebook’s campaign to combat vaccine misinformation comes as the United States is ramping up efforts to inoculate millions against COVID-19. Approximately 10% of U.S. citizens, or roughly 32 million people, have received at least one dose of one of the coronavirus vaccines, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
President Biden vowed to vaccinate the public at a speedy pace, announcing the goal of administering 100 million vaccine doses during his first 100 days in office in December 2020.
“One hundred million shots in the first 100 days,” the then-president-elect promised before introducing his top health official picks.
There have been more than 27 million COVID-19 diagnoses in the U.S. to date, and more than 463,000 deaths have been attributed to the disease, according to Johns Hopkins University’s coronavirus tracker.
Representatives for Facebook did not immediately reply to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
