Photo : Joe Raedle ( Getty )

Facebook, the very open platform that would like to be the opposite of that in the near future, announced a big change this week: It will no longer be a dumping grounds for the anti-vaccination conspiracies of a few misinformed clowns.




“We are working to tackle vaccine misinformation on Facebook by reducing its distribution and providing people with authoritative information on the topic,” Monika Bickert, Facebook’s Vice President of Global Policy Management, wrote in a company blog post this afternoon.

As outlined, the global kneecapping of anti- vaxers on Facebook will take a few forms: downgrading the ranking of pages and groups from search and on News Feed, rejecting ads that contain misinformation about vaccines, and 86ing these sorts of conspiracies from recommendations, Explore pages, and hashtag pages within Instagram, which Facebook, of course, owns.


The change comes less than a month after California Congressman Adam Schiff sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressing concern that Instagram and Facebook were “surfacing and recommending messages that discourage parents from vaccinating their children.”

This year the World Health Organization added vaccine hesitancy to its list of top global threats.

I don’t have anything funny to close this out. Vaccines are good. Herd immunity is real. Please vaccinate your kids.