Concern about her progress pandemic and thousands unvaccinated patients With COVID-19 hospitalized in his hospital, a French doctor posted a video on his Facebook account urging people to get vaccinated. In the blink of an eye, he received thousands of threatening messages from an extremist group. antivaccinators, V_V, which operates in France and Italy. Its members’ primary mission is to harass doctors and health officials, often destroying government offices and causing problems at vaccination centers.

Faced with the organization’s rhetoric and practices, Facebook managed to block some of its subgroups on the platform last December. This, however, did not stop V_V, who still uses facebook and other social networks not only for preaching against vaccines, but also for climate change denial and anti-democratic messages.

The fact that no one can stop them only proves the inability of the platform to fight the most destructive type of disinformation. Researchers at the British NGO Reset found more than 15,000 V_V posts promoting false information about vaccines, which increased in March 2022, months after Meta announced action against the organization. This, according to Reset experts, raises questions about the effectiveness of the platform’s intervention. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, responded that the purpose of its intervention was not to take the organization off the platform, but to shut down accounts that were involved in coordinated harassment.

In another development, Facebook and Instagram banned the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense, headed by Robert Kennedy Jr., for repeatedly violating its terms of service, which prohibit the spread of misinformation about COVID-19.