Sheryl Sandberg Facebook COO June 12 2019 01
Facebook wants to make it easier to donate blood
01:55 - Source: CNN
CNN  — 

Facebook says it wants to make sure its users aren’t duped by posts that make exaggerated or sensational health claims.

The social media giant said Tuesday it had updated its rankings so people’s news feeds will show fewer posts that, for example, assert a miracle cure or promote pills that promise to help you lose weight.

“Misleading health content is particularly bad for our community,” Facebook product manager Travis Yeh said in a blog post.

“Pages should avoid posts about health that exaggerate or mislead people and posts that try to sell products using health-related claims.”

The company said it would do this by identifying phrases that were commonly used in such posts.

Facebook and other social media platforms have been criticized for failing to curb the spread of health-related misinformation online, particularly around vaccines.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, told CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta last month that the company has “an obligation” to provide its users with safe and accurate health information.

Facebook announced in March that it was working to tackle vaccine misinformation on its platform by reducing the distribution of groups and pages that spread anti-vax content, and by rejecting ads that include misinformation about vaccines, among other strategies.

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“It’s taking us a while to ramp this [up] and we’re working with experts around the world, but we’re very, very committed to getting this right,” Sandberg told CNN. “We are dramatically decreasing the distribution and working on far fewer people seeing it. In some of the instances, we are taking things down, as well.”