Companies have acknowledged the problem and are taking modest steps to discourage misinformation
In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg weighed in on an unusually fraught issue with an uncommonly blunt statement: “Vaccination is an important and timely topic,” he wrote in a Facebook post about the book On Immunity by Eula Biss. “The science is completely clear: vaccinations work and are important for the health of everyone in our community.”
But when members of Facebook’s “community” seek information about vaccines on Facebook itself, they may be steered toward unscientific, anti-vaccination propaganda. On YouTube, a rival social media platform owned by Google, users seeking information about vaccines are similarly nudged toward anti-vaccination misinformation, much of it designed to frighten parents, even as a measles outbreak rages in the Pacific north-west.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Be9xNf
