In several closed and open Facebook groups that treat various diseases with “natural” and other alternative medicines, hundreds of thousands of users share claims that baking soda, vinegar and thyme are the few “medicines” that doctors do not want you to find out about.
Parents of autistic children are also part of various Facebook groups that focus on treating autism with non-science-based methods – by swallowing hydrogen (bleach) for which they are convinced that it will “heal” their children.
This phenomenon is also present in the Republic of North Macedonia. Various closed groups, as well as various media that are present with their own Facebook groups, similarly build narratives that cause distrust in standard medicine among readers by spreading news from suspicious sources in order to promote scientifically unproven alternative drugs for quite serious diseases.
Facebook plans to limit the scope of the distribution of posts in such groups that it believes contain health-related disinformation. This would mean that these posts would appear with lower intensity in the news feed, and thus would reach a lower number of users. Limiting would also refer to posts related to natural ways of treatment, which would also appear less frequently in the news feed.
The limiting process will use different keywords and phrases that are commonly used in posts that contain exaggerated or false health claims, but do not appear in posts that contain accurate information on the same topics. Different algorithms will detect suspicious phrases that the company has found with the help of health professionals in order to predict posts that offer sensational health-related titles.
Misleading readers through false information and information that is not based on facts about health is quite risky and harmful to any society. This is not a problem created by platforms like Facebook and Google, but by certain disinformation centers that abuse the freedom of speech for spreading disinformation and poisoning citizens with untruths.
The F2N2 team has detected more of these false posts, and has processed several of them. Read on the following link and here.
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This project was funded in part through a U.S. Embassy grant. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the implementers/authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Government.
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