STAT reports:

Facebook rolled out a new policy on Tuesday aimed at cracking down on vaccine falsehoods, a ballooning problem for the social network as a growing number of users with neutral views about vaccines appear to turn into vocal opponents.

The new policy prohibits formal advertisements that discourage people from getting vaccinated, reversing a years-long trend in which such ads were widely permitted. The site also said it will amplify factual messages from international public health authorities including the World Health Organization, as well as direct users in the U.S. to locations where they can get a flu shot. Those updates follow a number of other features released in recent months in a bid to combat misinformation about the pandemic and vaccines.

But the policies released this week and updates issued over the summer do not address Facebook’s most virulent sources of health-related falsehoods: pages and groups. Vaccine misinformation has taken an increasingly strong foothold in those spaces in recent months, with some individuals using them to peddle and profit from falsehoods while flying under the radar of policies designed to police advertisements.

Researchers have identified pages and groups — not formal advertisements — as misinformation super-spreaders. [Continue reading…]