Sara Fischer and Kia Kokalitcheva at Axios:
- YouTube: The company announced last month it will begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways, including videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness. "This includes certain types of anti-vaccination videos," the company says.
- Google: When it comes to Search, Google says that for queries that pertain to sensitive topics susceptible to misinformation, like health information, it has systems in place to prioritize results from authoritative sources. To help with this process, Google displays knowledge panels at the top of search results for illnesses and conditions with information from authoritative sources and have been evaluated by medical professionals.
- Facebook: Facebook says it has "taken steps to reduce the distribution of health-related misinformation on Facebook," but says it knows it has more to do. A spokesperson says it's currently working on additional changes that Facebook will be announcing soon. Facebook is considering changes like reducing or removing this type of content from recommendations and demoting it in search results.
- Twitter: There's no specific policy in place at Twitter to cover anti-vaccination content, but the company argues that the dynamics of its platform mean that readers are more likely to encounter balanced information.
- Pinterest: The company is currently blocking results for searches like "vaccine" or "vaccination" altogether, saying it doesn't want to lead users down a rabbit hole of potentially harmful advice. However, Axios searches for "vaxxer" or even "autism vaccine" still returned a slew of returns, suggesting it's still fairly easy for a user to be exposed to this content.
