It’s just gotten slightly harder for prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr to spread misinformation and disinformation about vaccines after he was deplatformed from a social media site.
Mr Kennedy was removed from Facebook owned platform ‘Instagram’ on Wednesday.
“We removed this account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” a Facebook spokesperson said.
Kennedy’s Statement
Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s Facebook page has been active since Friday as well as the organization he uses as a frontrunner to push non-valuable information about the vaccine.
He used those two pages to share links to an article where he takes aim at media coverage of the Instagram ban, saying “characterisations” describing him as an anti-vaxxer are “false and misleading” and he “unequivocally rejects them”.
“All the statements I made on Instagram were taken from the government’s database, peer-reviewed articles, and carefully confirmed news. Nothing I wrote was false, ”said Mr Kennedy.
He further added that there was a conspiracy between Facebook, pharmaceutical companies and government officials who had “censored”all the anti-vaccine beliefs.
“This kind of censorship is counter-productive if our objective is a safe and effective vaccine supply,” Mr Kennedy said.
The ban comes six months after a lawsuit was filed by him against Facebook, accusing the social media and a major advertiser giant of censorship for rejecting anti-vax ads and putting misinformation labels over posts trying to connect 5G technology to the coronavirus pandemic.
About Robert F. Kennedy Jr
Let’s start with who he’s not: A doctor, epidemiologist, or any sort of vaccine expert.
He is an environmental advocate, an anti-vaccine activist and a descendant of the American political empire.
His uncle John F. Kennedy was the last US President to be assassinated, in 1963.
His father, former US attorney general Robert F. Kennedy was also assassinated five years later.
RFK Jr. is the leader of a popular anti-vaxxer group that hides its name, Children’s Health Defense (CHD), to advocate against vaccination despite all the lives the medical mericales save.
Before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that would stoke further anti-vaxxer misinformation, he made headlines in Australia for appearing in an Instagram photo with fellow anti-vaxxer Pete Evans (in a curious contrast to Mr Kennedy’s situation, Mr Evans has been kicked off Facebook, but not Instagram).
“Robert F. Kennedy is not doing ‘important work’ for coming generations; he is perpetuating dangerous, anti-scientific myths which are causing tremendous harm in countries including the United States and Australia,” then-Royal Australian College of General Practitioners president Harry Nespolon told news.com.au last year, before Dr Nespolon passed away in July.
Mr Kennedy is a supporter of the widely disputed belief that vaccines cause autism.
Facebook’s Efforts To Remove Misinformation
Facebook has been recently trying to crack down on anti-vaccination content, part of a broader effort to tackle misinformation on the world’s biggest social media platform.
As part of that expansion, Facebook did a sweep to find and remove anti-vax content.
Mr Kennedy is huge proponent of said content, and his eagerness to spread it has also benefited Facebook financially in the past.
A study published in the journal Vaccine and seen by Ars Technica found the majority of anti-vaccine advertising on Facebook was purchased by a small number of organisations and Mr Kennedy was the single leading source for the ads, before the ads were banned.
When released on Instagram, where he had an estimated 800,000 followers, he is still active on Facebook since Friday morning.
His personal page, where he’s listed as an “environmental conservation organisation”, has over 305,000 followers.
The CHD page with over 147,000 followers is still in use.
Some of the things posted on CHD in the past include claims (marked as false on Facebook) that “unvaccinated kids are healthier”, as well as links to reports “loaded with charts” that were also labelled as partly false.
