A lot of misinformation circulates online around the issue of vaccines. But are social media platforms now about step up to curb all that anti-vaccination posts you see circulating in your newsfeed?

Our Verify squad is always working to set the record straight about the online rumors you hear.

The topic of vaccines is a highly debated issue and earlier this month Congressman Adam Schiff sent a letter to Google and Facebook saying they need to address the misinformation regarding anti-vaccines that's shared on those platforms.

To get answers, we first reached a Facebook spokesperson who told us they've taken steps to reduce distribution of health-related misinformation which include about what the company plans to do:

"As with other kinds of misinformation on Facebook, all health-related articles are eligible for fact-checking by our fact-checking partners, of which we have 39 around the world and are looking to expand. They show articles that third-party fact-checkers mark as false lower, and show third-party fact-checker articles higher to provide people with more context. We also remove content that violates our Community Standards.

Some of the additional things we're considering include reducing or removing this type of content from recommendations, and demoting it in search results and feed.

We will start to remove certain advertising targeting options, like 'vaccine controversies', to help reduce the potential for distribution of misinformation."

As for YouTube, parent company, Google says they will begin reducing recommendations of borderline content or videos that could misinform users in harmful ways that includes certain types of types of anti-vaccination videos.

Which include having health-related articles fact-checked by their partners and they will also start removing certain advertising targeting options, like "vaccine controversies".

As for YouTube, a spokesperson sent Verify researchers the following statement:

Misinformation is a difficult challenge and any misinformation on medical topics is especially concerning. We've taken a number of steps to address this including surfacing more authoritative content across our site for people searching for vaccination-related topics, beginning to reduce recommendations of certain anti-vaccination videos and showing information panels with more sources where they can fact check information for themselves. Like many algorithmic changes, these efforts will be gradual and will get more and more accurate over time.