Facebook owner Meta said on Thursday that it fired one of the most influential US anti-vaccination groups from the social media network for spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Children’s Health Defense (CHD), which has been a critic of COVID vaccines, immediately accused META of violating its right to freedom of speech. CHD founder Robert Kennedy Jr., the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy, said in a press release, “Facebook is here to serve as a surrogate for the federal government’s crusade to address all criticism of harsh government policies.” To calm down.”
Meta spokesman Aaron Simpson told AFP that the group’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram were shut down on Wednesday. The ban came after repeated violations of Meta’s misinformation rules.
CHD said its social media accounts were followed by hundreds of thousands of people, and claimed that the action taken by Meta was surprising.
In a release, the group shared a screen capture saying that the accounts were suspended for violating meta policies regarding “misinformation that can harm the real world.”
CHD argued that the ban may be related to a lawsuit filed against Meta, which accused the tech giant of violating free speech rights by relying on the US Centers for Disease Control, a covid-19 information scientist. is implicitly supported.
According to the legal filing, the anti-vaccine group has appealed the lower court’s ruling against it in the lawsuit.
In other news, American teens have quit Facebook over the past seven years, preferring to spend time on video-sharing venues YouTube and TikTok, according to Pew Research Center survey data on Wednesday. TikTok has “emerged as a top social media platform for American teens” while it is run by Google.
The report’s authors wrote, YouTube “stands out as the most common platform used by teens.” Pew’s data comes as Facebook-owner Meta is in a battle with TikTok for the primacy of social media, trying to keep the maximum number of its users as its share. Multi-billion dollar advertising-driven business.
The report said that 95 percent of the teens surveyed said they use YouTube, while 67 percent said they are TikTok users. Only 32 percent of the teens surveyed said they log on to Facebook — a huge drop from the 71 percent who reported being a user during a similar survey nearly seven years ago.
