Facebook has announced that it is taking steps to address the spread of sensational health claims. According to the media giant, “People come together on Facebook to talk about, advocate for, and connect around things like nutrition, fitness and health issues. But in order to help people get accurate health information and the support they need, it’s imperative that we minimize health content that is sensational or misleading. ”
Facebook claims that it made two ranking updates last month to reduce
- posts with exaggerated or sensational health claims and
- posts attempting to sell products or services based on health-related claims
It goes on to explain what it considers
- For the first update, it considers if a post about health exaggerates or misleads — for example, making a sensational claim about a miracle cure.
- For the second update, it consider if a post promotes a product or service based on a health-related claim — for example, promoting a medication or pill claiming to help you lose weight.
The updates came after a recent report that Facebook and YouTube were being overrun with content containing potentially harmful information about alternative cancer treatments.
The Wall Street Journal did a investigative study on the two sites and found out that widespread misinformation sometimes appeared alongside advertisements, videos or pages for proven treatments.
Facebook says it is handling this issue by “identifying phrases that were commonly used in these posts to predict which posts might include sensational health claims or promotion of products with health-related claims, and then showing these lower in News Feed. ”
Facebook says that most Pages won’t see any significant changes to their distribution in News Feed as a result of this update but posts with sensational health claims or solicitation using health-related claims will have reduced distribution.
Facebook advises that pages should avoid posts about health that exaggerate or mislead people and posts that try to sell products using health-related claims. If a Page stops posting this content, their posts will no longer be affected by this change.
