I love Pinterest: but there's no denying it's the type of place where you might expect anti-vaxxers to dwell (the ones who've been ex-communicated from other parenting forums, at least). Like any social sharing site, Pinterest can be an incredible resource for all things childcare, but it can also be a mine of misinformation.
However, the platform has now announced plans to fight measles misinformation by limiting results for measles search terms to pins from internationally recognised health organisations like World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
What does this mean? Essentially, users searching for content about measles will be prevented from stumbling across internet posts and articles that have driven a community of parents who won't vaccinate their children against this deadly disease. 'We've long long used guidance from health institutions to inform our policy and how we enforce it, but we wanted to do more,' Pinterest said.
Good for them. It's always re-assuring to see a social media site taking responsibility for the prevention of fake news, especially as social media has been accused of enabling an endemic sharing of scientifically unsubstantiated articles about the MMR vaccination.
'Social media platforms are the way many people get their information and they will likely be major sources of information for the next generations of parents' WHO said in a statementfollowing Pinterest's announcement. 'We see this as a critical issue and one that needs our collective effort to protect people’s health and lives.'
The UK is one of the countries to have recently lost its measles elimination status (along with Albania, Czech Republic and Greece), and in 2019 alone Europe has seen 90,000 cases of reported measles.
This shouldn't be happening: we shouldn't be seeing children (and sometimes adults) suffering from a dangerous disease, against which we are lucky enough to have the ability and resources to vaccinate.
Fighting the misinformation won't be easy, as anti-vaxxing 'role models' emerge left, right and centre. Jessica Biel was the most recent celebrity to fuel the movement, announcing her support of the anti-vaccination movement on Instagram: 'My dearest friends have a child with a medical condition that warrants an exemption from vaccinations, and should this bill pass, it would greatly affect their family’s ability to care for their child in this state. That’s why I spoke to legislators and argued against this bill.'
In May, Instagram announced that it's trying to curtail hashtags promoting anti-vaccination misinformation, but said that it has no plans to ban accounts identifying with the anti-vaxxing movement or anti-vaccination posts on the platform.
Let's hope that before the end of 2019, we'll see more social media sites following Pinterest's lead and making commitments to put out the fake news fires surrounding vaccination.