March 29, 2024

Pinterest Restricts Vaccine Search Results to Curb Spread of Misinformation

One or two in 1,000 children who contract this highly contagious disease will die. Last year, measles killed 72 adults and children in the European region, where measles has reached its highest levels in two decades. While measles deaths are rare in developed countries, the illness can have severe lasting consequences, such as vision loss.

There are several reasons for vaccine hesitancy: worries about side effects, cost, moral or religious objections, fears about a debunked link to autism and lack of knowledge about immunizations.

“We’re just seeing all sorts of misinformation flying around on social media,” said Arthur L. Caplan, head of the Division of Medical Ethics at the New York University School of Medicine, who has been writing about vaccine ethics and policy for 25 years.

“Fake news. Fake science,” he said on Friday. “Everybody’s an expert.”

An analysis by The Daily Beast of seven Facebook pages that promote anti-vaccine posts found that the pages had bought a combined 147 Facebook ads that had been viewed millions of times. Most of them targeted women over the age of 25, it reported.

Last week, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, a Democrat and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, asking what steps the company was taking to prevent anti-vaccine information from being recommended to users. He sent a similar letter to Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, which owns YouTube.

“We’ve taken steps to reduce the distribution of health-related misinformation on Facebook, but we know we have more to do,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement. “We’re currently working on additional changes that we’ll be announcing soon.”

The company said it was considering reducing or removing this type of content from recommendations and demoting it in search results.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/health/pinterest-vaccination-searches.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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