SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the threw-the-facebook-out-with-the-vax-water dept.
Facebook cracks down on vaccine misinformation
In a blog post, the Menlo Park, Calif. company said it will reject any ads containing misinformation about vaccines, remove any targeted advertising options like 'vaccine controversies,' and will no longer show or recommend content containing this type of misinformation on Instagram Explore or hashtag pages."
Submitted via IRC for FatPhil
Combatting Vaccine Misinformation
We are working to tackle vaccine misinformation on Facebook by reducing its distribution and providing people with authoritative information on the topic.
[...] Leading global health organizations, such as the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have publicly identified verifiable vaccine hoaxes. If these vaccine hoaxes appear on Facebook, we will take action against them.
For example, if a group or Page admin posts this vaccine misinformation, we will exclude the entire group or Page from recommendations, reduce these groups and Pages’ distribution in News Feed and Search, and reject ads with this misinformation.
We also believe in providing people with additional context so they can decide whether to read, share, or engage in conversations about information they see on Facebook. We are exploring ways to give people more accurate information from expert organizations about vaccines at the top of results for related searches, on Pages discussing the topic, and on invitations to join groups about the topic. We will have an update on this soon.
We are fully committed to the safety of our community and will continue to expand on this work.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 14 2019, @06:19PM
There's plenty of anti-science bias out there among all parties. Economics is particularly notorious for it.
For example, there's a famous example from the early days of Obama's administration where a couple of pet economists projected that a stimulus bill was necessary to mitigate massive unemployment a huge recession (Projection [nytimes.com] versus reality [google.com], see page 41).
The actual unemployment that happened on the heels of the successful stimulus bill was worse than the projected outcome of no stimulus. Their excuse? The recession was worse than we knew. My take is that the stimulus plan was worse than they presented.
Now, I'm sure I'm going to hear from people that economics isn't science. Because somehow, when you introduce people, then the scientific method breaks. Or something. But in the above example, a falsifiable prediction was made, and well, it got falsified. Falsifiability is one of the key requirements for any predictions made from scientific theories.