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SYDNEY: Facebook said on Thursday (Dec. 24) that it removed the page of Australian celebrity chef-turned-conspiracy theorist Pete Evans for spreading misinformation about COVID-19, the tech giant’s latest move to monitor fake content about the pandemic.
Evans, a former prime-time Australian cooking show judge with a large catalog of cookbooks, has become one of the country’s most prominent broadcasters of unsubstantiated claims challenging COVID-19, calling it a “hoax. “and” BS “for his millions of Facebook followers. .
It has also urged people not to be tested for the virus that has killed more than 1.7 million people or to get vaccinated, a move that experts say is key to ending the pandemic. He announced on his Instagram page on November 20 that he would be leaving Facebook, but continued to post there until Thursday, when his page disappeared.
“We do not allow anyone to share misinformation about COVID-19 that could lead to imminent physical harm or (about) COVID-19 vaccines that have been discredited by public health experts,” Facebook said in a statement.
“We have clear policies against this type of content and have removed Chef Pete Evans’ Facebook page for repeated violations of these policies.”
Facebook did not say why it maintained Evans’ Instagram page, which it owns. There, Evans told his 278,000 supporters on Thursday that he was “very happy to be one of the catalysts for a conversation on such an important issue (as) freedom of expression.”
In previous Instagram posts, still online, he referred to the vaccine as a “scam” and a “poison,” and appeared to discourage coronavirus testing by saying, “no testing … no cases.”
Facebook, which has been under pressure to curb misinformation on its platform, said earlier this month that it would begin removing discredited claims about coronavirus vaccines from Facebook and Instagram. An advocacy group has said the platform received some 3.8 billion views of misleading health content in the year through August, flooding the amount of legitimate information.
This week, the Israeli government said that Facebook, at its request, had removed four groups that had disseminated texts, photos and videos with “deliberately menacing content designed to mislead about coronavirus vaccines.”
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