FB expands fight against Covid vax misinformation to include kids

San Francisco, Oct 31: Tech giant Facebook has expanded its policies and its Covid-19 vaccination efforts to include kids shortly after the FDA authorised the emergency use of the Pfizer vaccine for children aged 5 to 11.

In the coming weeks, it will send in-feed English and Spanish reminders to users in the US that the Covid-19 vaccine is now available for kids. Those reminders will also include a link that will help users find the nearest vaccination site, Engadget reported.A

Perhaps, more importantly, it will expand its anti-vaccine misinformation policies to remove claims that Covid-19 vaccines for kids do not exist and that the vaccine for children is untested.

It will also remove any claim that Covid-19 vaccines can kill or seriously harm kids, that they are not effective for children at all, and that anything other than a Covid-19 vaccine can inoculate children against the virus.

Facebook said its fight against vaccine misinformation is part of an ongoing effort in partnership with the CDC, the WHO, and other health authorities.

It promises to keep on updating its policies and ban any new claims about the Covid-19 vaccine for children that will emerge in the future.

The website, which now operates under its parent company Meta, said it has removed more than 20 million pieces of content from Facebook and Instagram since the beginning of the pandemic.

As of August 2021, it has also banned 3,000 accounts, groups and pages for repeatedly breaking its health misinformation policies.