Facebook policy to stop vaccine misinformation only worked temporarily

Between November 2020 and February 2021, Facebook introduced policies to cut down on misinformation related to covid-19 vaccines, but they only worked for about six months

By Chris Stokel-Walker

Policies put in place by Facebook to tackle covid-19 vaccine misinformation had a meaningful impact on the amount of negative conversation around jabs – but only temporarily.

David Broniatowski at George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues used CrowdTangle, a tool belonging to Facebook’s owner Meta, to analyse anti-vaccine conversations on Facebook before and after the platform made policy changes. These were introduced between November 2020 and February 2021 and included removing …