With over 2.3 billion users, Facebook has a lot to keep track of. And with the decision to personalize the ads those users receive, the company ended up adding even more to its plate.
According to The Guardian , these ads are served to people based on their interest in thousands of potential categories. Some of these are chosen by the users themselves, but other are served based on their online activities.
Unfortunately, the massive scope of these categories and Facebook’s user base can give certain groups an opportunity to sneak misinformation in if they know the system well enough.
And as far as one U.S. congressman is concerned, that fact could make a public health crisis worse.
Last week, California Congressman Adam Schiff wrote letters to the CEOs of both Facebook and Google concerning health information on their platforms.
According to The Guardian , Schiff’s main issue with what he saw was that “The algorithms which power these services are not designed to distinguish quality information from misinformation or misleading information, and the consequences of that are particularly troubling for public health issues.”
In particular, he called out the fact that Facebook allows paid advertisements from anti-vax groups.
These targeted ads usually spread the most effectively through the “vaccine controversies” category, which reaches about 900,000 people and the “informed consent” category, which reaches 340,000 people.
Indeed, those with influence in the anti-vax community seem well aware of how effective these targeted ads can be.
One such person, Larry Cook, has already raised $7,700 on GoFundMe to pay for these ads since January 29. This brings the total of anti-vax promotion funds he’s raised since 2015 to $80,000.
As The Guardian reported , Cook claimed to spend over $35,000 a year on Facebook ads.
And this flood of ads can have very real implications for the spread of preventable diseases.
Cook is currently targeting ads to mothers in Washington State, where vaccine hesitancy has taken root to enough of a degree that the state is now experiencing a measles outbreak.
In the past, Facebook has suggested that censoring anti-vax rhetoric is less helpful than “counter-speech” with accurate information about them.
However, the problem that pro-vaccine activists like Karen Ernst of Voices for Vaccines face is not only that anti-vax groups have both the resources and the Facebook foot soldiers to squeeze out opposition, but also the idea of framing a straightforward public health issue as a controversy.
As she said , a war of targeted ads “gets toward making social media a place where vaccines are fought over, which feels really counterproductive to public health. It’s making the echo chamber more echo-y.”
However, Facebook started to take a more active role in its targeted categories after a Russian operation took advantage of its system during the 2016 Presidential election.
A year later, a report by ProPublica found an array of automatically generated targeted categories based on anti-Semitic phrases.
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This report led Facebook to remove the targeted categories involved, with representatives saying they were, “building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future.”
Likely for this reason, Facebook seems more amenable to tackling the anti-vax ads issue nowadays.
In response to congressman Schiff’s letter, a Facebook representative said, “We’ve taken steps to reduce the distribution of health-related misinformation on Facebook, but we know we have more to do. We’re currently working on additional changes that we’ll be announcing soon.”
But we may already have a fix on what those changes could be.
According to The Guardian , the spokesperson said the company is considering removing anti-vaccine misinformation from recommendations and kicking it off the top search results.
They also said the company is already having third-party fact-checkers examine health articles.
h/t: The Guardian
