Facebook hides the tag #VaccinesKill from searches, displaying a message that says it is “keeping our community safe”, two years after Instagram hid the tag
(CNN)Last week, even as it came under fire from the White House over its role in spreading anti-vaccine misinformation …
CNN
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a loop Facebook opened in February 2019, when it said it was exploring ways to address anti-vaccine misinformation in search and recommendations, followed by a March 2019 pledge to demote anti-vaccine Pages, halt recommendations, and reject ads. Enforcement visibly lagged: two months after that first pledge, the #vaccineskill tag was still prominent on Instagram (CNN found), and a year later Instagram's search remained a haven of vaccine misinformation despite Facebook's Explore and hashtag-page commitments.
First-order effects
Searches for #VaccinesKill on Facebook now return an interstitial message instead of results, matching what Instagram did with the same tag two years ago — the slowest-adopted platform finally inherits the oldest fix.
The move lands while Facebook is under direct White House criticism over its role in spreading vaccine misinformation, giving the company a concrete action to point to.
Second-order effects
Instagram's earlier hiding of the tag demonstrably failed to stop misinformation from dominating its search results per 2020 reporting (Engadget), so Facebook's copy-paste of that measure invites scrutiny of whether hashtag suppression is sufficient or whether recommendation algorithms keep resurfacing the content elsewhere.
Anti-vaccine communities already pushed off ranking and recommendations by Facebook's 2019 policy have had years to migrate into groups and Pages; hiding one tag shifts moderation burden to those surfaces without removing the underlying networks.
Third-order effects
If each new enforcement step takes roughly two years to propagate from one Meta app to another — as this tag did from Instagram to Facebook — public-health pressure on platforms will keep outpacing platform-by-platform rollout, strengthening the case for cross-platform standards rather than per-app pledges.
The pattern of announce-first, enforce-later documented across 2019–2021 makes external verification (researchers, press, regulators) a standing requirement for judging whether any given misinformation pledge is real.
The trend: Meta's vaccine-misinformation enforcement is converging toward uniform hashtag-level suppression across Facebook and Instagram, but at a multi-year lag per measure and under mounting government pressure.
Anyways, here's my complete story with @BrandyZadrozny today on how anti-vaxxers actually talk on Facebook. They talk like dancers or swimmers or dinner-goers because they're speaking in code to avoid bans. It's good, I think. I hope you read it. https://www.nbcnews.com/...
One 40k-member antivaxx group is also bragging about getting around Facebook's moderation bots by just swapping out language and calling it a “Dance Party” after the White House press conference last week. https://www.nbcnews.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Facebook has allowed the hashtag #vaccineskill to thrive with misinformation for years, only blocking it now after CNN asked about it. And it's not the first time this has happened https://www.cnn.com/... https://twitter.com/...
“The change happened hours after CNN Business asked Facebook why the page full of anti-vaccination falsehoods was easy to find. If this sounds familiar, it's because almost the exact same thing happened with Facebook-owned Instagram two years ago...” https://www.cnn.com/...
If you watched Sunday's @ReliableSources, you saw me say this: “It's not hard to find anti-vaccination propaganda on the platform. We took a look. If you just search the hashtag #VaccinesKill, you'll see it live on Facebook right now, and you'll see hundreds of posts...” https://…
Can we TALK about social media? What happens if build an algorithm to ensure that there is some proportion of TALK in timelines and news feeds? Timely Accurate Local Knowledge (You know, the boring stuff) https://twitter.com/...
If this story sounds familiar, it's because the same thing happened with Facebook-owned Instagram two years ago, pre-Covid. @CNNBusiness wrote about the “Vaccines Kill” hashtag, and then it was blocked on Insta, but not FB. Company's explanation is here >> https://www.cnn.com/...
Before airtime, I asked Facebook PR about the “Vaccines Kill” hashtag, since it seemed like a violation of FB policies. By the end of the day, the hashtag had been hidden. It's yet another example of the Whack-a-mole that happens all across social media... https://www.cnn.com/...
.@selenagomez is right. @Facebook & @instagram must take action in removing super spreaders of anti-vaxx misinformation. Demand big tech takes action now: https://www.counterhate.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
“Our process to determine whether a hashtag violates our policies takes several factors into account,” [including how much we have been beaten around the head about it by the President of the United States in the last week]
Definitely agree: “The problem of misinformation on social media has less to do with what gets said by users than what gets amplified — that is, shown widely to others — by platforms' recommendation software.” https://twitter.com/...