Facebook Helping Get 50 Million People Vaccinated

Facebook announced Monday that it would disseminate information on Covid-19 to help 50 million people get vaccinated.

Because of its popularity as a mainstream social media platform, Facebook is launching a tool to give people vaccine information and make appointments. This will be in the Covid Information Center and will show up on the News Feed.

Facebook has also partnered with Boston Children’s Hospital to offer the hospital’s VaccineFinder tool for users to locate vaccination sites local to them. It will publish the information in 71 languages.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also launching the Covid Information Center on Instagram. Users who get vaccinated will also have access to vaccine-related stickers to decorate their selfies before posting them.

Another Facebook-owned platform, WhatsApp, will include chatbots to help people register for vaccinations. Facebook is working with health organizations and government officials to serve the public through chatbots. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, city officials announced that they would send notifications to residents through the messaging platform when it was their turn to receive a vaccine. Other countries that are incorporating WhatsApp include Brazil and Indonesia.

Facebook also said that they would be adding a Covid-19 vaccine label to posts in the next few weeks to inform users of the tests vaccines go through for safety and efficacy before they are approved. The label has information directly obtained from the World Health Organization and redirects readers to the Covid Information Center. It will roll out globally in English, Spanish, Indonesian, Portuguese, Arabic and French, with more to come.

Users can also track the spread of information on social media with CrowdTangle’s Covid-19 Live Displays, a communication technology tracker. Everyone can peruse vaccine-related posts on Facebook, Instagram and Reddit in 34 languages and across 104 countries and all 50 U.S. states.

Lastly, Facebook is adding new data and insights to its Facebook Data for Good’s Covid-19 map and dashboard. Users will see vaccine acceptance and hesitancy rates and monitor vaccine rollout in over 200 countries and territories. The dashboard is regularly updated by data collected by Facebook’s partners at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland as part of the Covid-19 Symptom Survey.

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