Facebook reportedly removed over 80 alternative health pages earlier this summer as part of a crackdown on fake news.
The cull of natural health themed Facebook accounts was a by-product of the social media giant’s announcement in January this year that it was changing its newsfeed algorithms. Publicly, Facebook was saying that it was rebalancing content on its platform, with a renewed emphasis on family and friend ‘sharing’ and a move away from news and political content. But, rather more pressingly, it was responding to growing political and regulatory pressure to remove millions of fake accounts or those that violated Facebook’s terms of use.
Facebook relies on AI as the main solution to sift through the billions of pieces of content that users post on the site each day. It’s quite possible then that some alternative health sites could be caught in this algorithmic net. But the discovery that dozens of similar sites were closed down in a short period during the summer has fuelled suspicion that natural health sites are being deliberately targeted.
Accounts reportedly deleted by Facebook include several with large followings – for example Just Natural Medicine (1 million followers), Natural Cures Not Medicine (2.3 million followers) and People’s Awakening (3.6 million followers) – and many smaller accounts. Pages are typically closed down without notice and replaced with a ‘this page doesn’t exist’ notice. Page administrators have been told that the decision to close their account is final.
Writing on the Alliance for Natural Health website, Charlie Jones (in an expansive commentary on the wider role of social media) says that what these accounts have in common is that they “contain views that oppose mainstream narratives”. It’s this common factor that has led some in the natural health movement to claim that the sector is being deliberately targeted.
But it’s not just the natural health sector that is concerned about recent developments. The trade website for the publishing industry What’s New in Publishing, fears that the move by Facebook amounts to an assault on the livelihoods of independent publishers. It too suspects ulterior motives. In a post, the website notes that the recent purge “appears aimed at alternative news sites that specialise in wellness, nutrition, lifestyle balance, meditation and spirituality”. In a post, the site notes: “One can argue that Facebook has every right to delete pages of hateful, divisive and inflammatory content, but it’s difficult to square that approach with a page dedicated to mediation, organic food or wildlife”.