The company has also launched salvos against QAnon and election-related misinformation, while taking an aggressive approach toward political advertising, and political content in general.
And as global authorities struggle to convince the public that an eventual COVID-19 vaccine will be safe to take despite the expedited approval process, Facebook has decided to give them a hand by banning all content encouraging users to refuse to take a vaccine. It laid out the new global policy in a blog post published Tuesday.
“Now, if an ad explicitly discourages someone from getting a vaccine, we’ll reject it,” the company’s Head of Health Kang-Xing Jin and Director of Product Management Rob Leathern said in a blog post Tuesday.
Facebook will draw the line at allowing users who advocate against “mandatory vaccination,” which the company said was a legitimate political position (not an argument made in “bad faith” that some on the left insist), to post as normal. They cited an example of a state lawmaker from Virginia who posted “STOP FORCED CORONAVIRUS VACCINATIONS”.