ArticleScience advances2023
The efficacy of Facebook's vaccine misinformation policies and architecture during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Article in Science advances, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- Vaccine communication: a critical review of foundations, challenges, and future directions.NPJ vaccines · 2026Review
- The dichotomy of progress: Public perceptions of global health trends and antibiotic knowledge in Georgia.PLOS global public health · 2026Article
- Statistical misreasoning in online content about vaccines: Implications and recommendations for addressing disinformation.PloS one · 2026Article
- Auditing the impact of social media's policy shift on anti-vaccine discourse: A large language model-driven empirical study.PloS one · 2026Article
- Quality Analysis of YouTube and Facebook Videos for Glaucoma Treatment Options.Clinical ophthalmology (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2026Article
- Pragmatic lessons for harnessing social media for health research through digital data donation post-API access.npj digital public health · 2026Review
- Understanding crisis dynamics during public health emergencies: an integrated framework of social consequences, trust, and behavioral responses.Frontiers in public health · 2026Review
- Explaining Twitter's inability to effectively moderate content during the COVID-19 pandemic.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Perceived legitimacy of layperson and expert content moderators.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Understanding Interventions to Address Infodemics Through Epidemiological, Socioecological, and Environmental Health Models: Framework Analysis.JMIR infodemiology · 2025Article
- Modeling the amplification of epidemic spread by individuals exposed to misinformation on social media.Npj complexity · 2025Article
- HPV vaccine-related articles shared on Facebook from 2019 to 2021: Did COVID make a difference?PEC innovation · 2024Article
- Public agreement with misinformation about wind farms.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- A population level study on the determinants of COVID-19 vaccination rates at the U.S. county level.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The Role of Social Media in Knowledge, Perceptions, and Self-Reported Adherence Toward COVID-19 Prevention Guidelines: Cross-Sectional Study.JMIR infodemiology · 2024Article
- Generative artificial intelligence can have a role in combating vaccine hesitancy.BMJ (Clinical research ed.) · 2024Article
- News and misinformation consumption: A temporal comparison across European countries.PloS one · 2024Article
- What can public health communicators learn from Reddit? A perspective for the next pandemic.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Online misinformation promotes distrust in science, undermines public health, and may drive civil unrest. During the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, Facebook-the world's largest social media company-began to remove vaccine misinformation as a matter of policy. We evaluated the efficacy of these policies using a comparative interrupted time-series design. We found that Facebook removed some antivaccine content, but we did not observe decreases in overall engagement with antivaccine content. Provaccine content was also removed, and antivaccine content became more misinformative, more politically polarized, and more likely to be seen in users' newsfeeds. We explain these findings as a consequence of Facebook's system architecture, which provides substantial flexibility to motivated users who wish to disseminate misinformation through multiple channels. Facebook's architecture may therefore afford antivaccine content producers several means to circumvent the intent of misinformation removal policies.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.