Facebook pledges to combat vaccine misinformation from going viral
Facebook announced its commitment to help stop the vaccine misinformation through directing its users to the World Health Organization (WHO) sites which provide reliable information about vaccines in several languages. Such action was applauded by the WHO seeing that ‘vaccine misinformation is a major threat to global health that could reverse decades of progress made in tackling preventable diseases’. Following an anti-vaccination movement that went viral earlier, some media reports showed that immunisation rates have sloped worldwide in developed and developing countries equally. Thus, ‘major digital organisations have a responsibility to their users—to ensure that they can access facts about vaccines and health. It would be great to see social and search platforms come together to leverage their combined reach,’ emphasised WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus. Yet, such movement should be in tandem with similar efforts by governments to enhance public health and boost trust in vaccination, as further noted by Ghebreyesus.