Facebook to reduce the spread of misleading health claims

Facebook has made updates to reduce posts with "sensational" claims, after a media report showed fake cancer cures on social media.

In a blog post, Facebook product manager Travis Yeh said it made changes to its page-ranking algorithm to reduce "posts with exaggerated or sensational health claims" and attempts to sell products based on these claims.

The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported that Facebook and YouTube were filled with "harmful information" about health treatments such as the use of baking soda injections to cure cancer.

Yeh said the changes were part of efforts to reduce the spread of misleading medical claims including from groups opposing the use of recommended vaccines.

"We know that people don't like posts that are sensational or spammy, and misleading health content is particularly bad for our community," said Yeh.

"In order to help people get accurate health information and the support they need, it's imperative that we minimise health content that is sensational or misleading."

Yeh said the company handled this in a similar way to how they've previously reduced low-quality content like clickbait, by identifying phrases that were commonly used in posts to predict which posts might include sensational health claims or promotion of products with health-related claims, and then showing these lower in the news feed.

"The update will not have a major impact on users' news feed," he said.