When news broke last month that two elderly patients in Brisbane had been given an incorrect dose of the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine, a motley assortment of Australian Facebook pages and groups swung into action.

Two weeks earlier, on February 9, the company had promised to “immediately” crack down on COVID-19 misinformation around the world by deleting content that made incorrect claims about the virus and the vaccines. Banned posts continue to circulate. Three weeks later, they’re still up.

The posts are still going

As Australia rolls out COVID vaccines, experts have expressed frustration with Facebook for the volume of anti-vaccine claims that continue to circulate on the platform.

Some of these posts were eventually demoted or deleted, but by then they had already received a lot of interactions, said Esther Chan, First Draft’s Australian bureau editor.

“Even if Facebook enforcement is working, it’s pretty slow at this point,” she said. “Some posts get actioned on the moment they’re posted and then some don’t. And then some get taken down eventually. And some are still around.”

Facebook says it’s doing a lot behind the scenes

The company says it pulled down almost 12 million pieces of COVID-19 misinformation worldwide between March and October 2020, and applied warning labels to about 167 million pieces of content.

Some of Facebook’s difficulty with moderating anti-vaccine claims can be put down to the complexity of language itself. This type of malinformation (information taken out of context with malicious intent) is not only hard to detect, but puts Facebook in an awkward bind: let it go or enter the murky world of context and imputation.

In a statement, Facebook Australia’s head of public policy, Josh Machin, said misinformation was a “highly adversarial and ever-evolving space”. 

‘‘  Which is why we continue to consult with outside experts, grow our fact-checking program and improve our internal technical capabilities  ’’

“We will remove false claims about the safety, efficacy, ingredients or side effects of the vaccine, including conspiracy theories, and continue to ban ads that discourage vaccines, and remove COVID-19 misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm.”