Between November 2020 and February 2021, Facebook introduced policies to cut down on misinformation related to covid-19 vaccines, but they only worked for about six months
Technology
15 February 2022
As part of its policy on covid-19 misinformation, Facebook removed posts with false claims about vaccines Sipa US/Alamy
Policies put in place by Facebook to tackle covid-19 vaccine misinformation had a meaningful impact on the amount of negative conversation around jabs – but only temporarily.
David Broniatowski at George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues used CrowdTangle, a tool belonging to Facebook’s owner Meta, to analyse anti-vaccine conversations on Facebook before and after the platform made policy changes. These were introduced between November 2020 and February 2021 and included removing …