The social media platform said in a blog post the ban will exclude "ads that advocate for or against legislation or government policies around vaccines," CNBC reported. But the organizations running the ads still need approval and an appropriate "paid for by" label accompanying the ad.
"Our goal is to help messages about the safety and efficacy of vaccines reach a broad group of people, while prohibiting ads with misinformation that could harm public health efforts," Facebook's head of health, Kang-Xing Jin, and its director of product management, Rob Leathern, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
"We already don't allow ads with vaccine hoaxes that have been publicly identified by leading global health organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)," the blog post read.
The policy comes amid a broader effort at Facebook to weed out false or misleading information put out across its networks. Facebook said Oct. 6 that is banning all accounts across all platforms from the conspiracy theory group QAnon and on Oct. 12, the platform announced a ban on "all content that denies or distorts the Holocaust."
Comment: Facebook had already banned content about vaccine awareness some time ago, and now they're banning ads. Of course this isn't limited to Facebook. Amazon, Google, and Youtube have also attempted to control the dissemination of information about the harms of vaccines. This control is effective for certain types of people who have little to no interest in truth or discovery. But there are those who do want the truth, and such control can do nothing against that.