Facebook has banned 3,000 accounts for COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation

Given that the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Fb has taken a a lot tougher stance on health and fitness misinformation than it has in the past, taking away thousands and thousands of posts for sharing misinformation. Now, we know just how quite a few accounts, teams and webpages have been banned from the platform for consistently breaking all those regulations: 3,000.

Fb shared the stat as component of its group benchmarks enforcement report, which actions how the company enforces its principles. The range might appear small given the extensive amount of misinformation on Facebook about the pandemic and the vaccines.The corporation also said that additional than 20 million pieces of content have been eradicated and more than 190 million have warning labels concerning the get started of the pandemic in 2020 and this previous June.

But the rather lower number of bans — just 3,0000 — tracks with conclusions by researchers who say that just a couple people today are responsible for the wide majority of vaccine mistruths on social media.

During a connect with with reporters, Facebook’s VP of Content material Policy Monika Bickert, mentioned the corporation has experienced to frequently evolve its policies, and that it now removes 65 forms of vaccine falsehoods, these as posts saying COVID-19 shots trigger magnetism. She also noted that some teams have utilized “coded language” to check out to evade the company’s detection, which can pose a obstacle.

Facebook’s managing of vaccine misinformation has been in the highlight in modern months as governing administration officials, which include President Joe Biden, have explained Facebook must do much more to counter mistruths about the COVID-19 vaccines. On its portion, Fb suggests that vaccine hesitancy has declined by 50 percent in the US, according to its surveys, and that its COVID-19 Data Middle has arrived at 2 billion people today.