In March, Instagram began blocking hashtags like #vaccinescauseautism and #vaccinesarepoison as a “short-term measure,” to combat the spread of vaccine misinformation. The social media giant is employing machine learning to understand which hashtags are associated with false information and to remove posts that violate its misinformation policies, according to the report.
Instagram also plans to release a pop-up message that users will see when searching for vaccine information, which will connect them to high-quality information on the topic. Instagram defines “known vaccine misinformation” as information that has been verified false by organizations such as the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control.
“If the hashtag was #vaccines1234, if it contained a high proportion of known vaccine misinformation, we would block that hashtag entirely,” Karina Newton, Instagram’s global head of public policy, said at a May 9 press event in San Francisco, Calif., Verge reports.
Instagram did not disclose the specific percentage of misinformation that hashtags must present in order to be blocked because the social network does not want to encourage users to “try to game the system,” according to the report.
Instagram’s efforts to remove vaccine misinformation from its platform are in its early stages, and users will most likely continue to see antivaccine information “for some time,” Ms. Newton said.
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