The social media giant Facebook is again at the center of criticism. This time, the reason is that he allowed some posts despite his promise that he would not allow anti-vaccine posts. Recently, the social media platform has been criticized frequently. Because, according to reports released a few months ago, the company is accused of sharing users’ information. It was also claimed that he made various projects for children to use social media.
Facebook releases anti-vaccine ads
According to CNN’s report, the social media platform said it blocked anti-vaccine messages. However, it has been reported that he has recently allowed multiple anti-vaccine advertisements to be published on his site. Moreover, one of these advertisements was taking a rather harsh stance. Because he compared the vaccination conditions with the Holocaust.
In another advertisement published on Facebook, there were t-shirts promoted with the message “I am originally from America, but I am currently living in 1941 Germany”. Since May, Facebook has earned more than $280,000 from ads for its ‘Ride the Red Wave’ page. The page has less than 10,000 followers but can potentially reach millions by paying Facebook.
The ‘Next Level Goods’ page, which is also run by a company, has spent more than $500,000 on Facebook ads since 2019. The company regularly uses Facebook to advertise anti-vaccine t-shirts. Meanwhile, the ads were most viewed by users in Texas, Florida, and California, according to Facebook data.
Facebook had to make a statement about how these ads were published. The company recently promised to remove posts that suggest that COVID-19 vaccines are harmful. It also announced that it deleted more than 20 million pieces of content. Facebook owner Meta said ads that compare COVID-19 policies with Nazi Germany’s and describe vaccines as poison are against their ‘disclosure policy’.
However, this has been a problem because Facebook doesn’t manually review all ads, according to NYU researcher Laura Edelson. Another reason for this is that commercial pages face a more moderate policy compared to political campaigns. Most likely, Facebook’s detection systems overlooked these ads.
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