Facebook is considering making it harder to find anti-vaccine content in its search results and excluding organizations pushing anti-vaccine messages from groups it recommends to users after a lawmaker suggested those kinds of steps, according to a person familiar with the company’s possible response.
Facebook is aware of the potential danger of the so-called anti-vax movement, and the person familiar with the company’s plans said the company appreciated U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff backing vaccinations.
A company representative declined to speak on the record about possible anti-vax policies but said Facebook is working to curb the spread of “health-related misinformation.”
“We’ve taken steps to reduce the distribution of health-related misinformation on Facebook, but we know we have more to do,” the representative said. “We’re currently working on additional changes that we’ll be announcing soon.”
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, which many say increase the threat posed by highly infectious but preventable diseases. Last week, Schiff wrote to both companies to suggest that they make it harder for people to see those posts.
Doctors and scientists “are in overwhelming consensus that vaccines are both effective and safe,” wrote Schiff, whose party wields increased power after regaining control of the House of Representatives in November’s mid-term elections.
Schiff asked both companies what steps they are taking to “prevent anti-vaccine videos or information from being recommended to users, either algorithmically or as a suggested search result.”
There’s no evidence to back up the anti-vaccine movement’s claims that the shots can cause birth defects and debilitating conditions, he added, “and the dissemination of unfounded and debunked theories about the dangers of vaccinations pose a great risk to public health.”
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.
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 measures, the agency 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, Schiff wrote.
“There is strong evidence to suggest that at least part of the source of this trend is the degree to which medically inaccurate information about vaccines surface on the websites where many Americans get their information,” he wrote. “The algorithms which power these services are not designed to distinguish quality information from misinformation or misleading information, and the consequences of that are particularly troubling for public health issues.”
In late January, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee declared a state of emergency after 26 cases of measles in the state, a move that allowed officials to request additional medical resources from other states.
Those cases signal the “resurgence of a potentially fatal disease that was effectively eliminated from the United States decades ago by vaccines,” Schiff said.
Google didn’t return a message seeking comment on Thursday.
