As it comes under increasing pressure from lawmakers and public health advocates that it take action to clamp down on anti-vaccine messaging, Facebook continues to allow people and groups to run ads promoting it.
On Thursday, California Rep. Adam Schiff sent Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai a letter outlining concerns with the way the big tech platforms surface anti-vaccine content, and ramping up the pressure on them to take action. “The algorithms which power these services are not designed to distinguish quality information from misinformation or misleading information,” Schiff writes. “And the consequences of that are particularly troubling for public health issues.”
In response to Schiff’s demand that the platform do something about the growing anti-vax community, Facebook said in a statement to Bloomberg News that it is currently “exploring additional measures to best combat” anti-vax content. Facebook is currently looking at “reducing or removing this type of content from recommendations, including Groups You Should Join, and demoting it in search results, while also ensuring that higher quality and more authoritative information is available.”
All of this comes days after a massive Guardian report detailing how networks of massive anti-vax groups and pages have created an algorithmic feedback, pushing users into deeper and deeper vaccine-skeptic rabbit holes.