Facebook change to control covid-19 vaccine misinformation failed

Facebook’s attempts to remove misinformation about covid-19 vaccines from its platform instead made anti-vaccine content more extreme, say researchers.

David Broniatowski at the George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues monitored engagement with more than 200,000 posts on Facebook pages and groups between 15 November 2019 and 28 February 2022. Within that period, Facebook made three major announcements, which together advanced the platform’s approach to clamping down on content that shared incorrect information about vaccinations.

The researchers analysed the …