Facebook launches education campaign to help Samoan’s identify false health info

Menlo Park, CALIFORNIA — On Wednesday Facebook launched a public education campaign to help people in Samoa learn how to identify and combat health misinformation. 

The campaign, which will run for the next five weeks in Samoa includes graphics and videos that will run in English and Samoan, and aims to support local users with three key behaviors: 

•                Awareness - Be informed that misinformation exists

•                Investigation - Find out more to confirm if the information is indeed false

•                Action - Visit the local health authority to get accurate information

Mia Garlick, Director of Public Policy for Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Islands said, “One of our commitments is to connect people to reliable information, and give people the tools to make informed decisions about the information they see on Facebook. For this campaign, we are focusing our efforts further to target COVID-19 and vaccine related misinformation, ensuring that Samoan’s are able to scrutinize what they are seeing against official public health resources.”

 “We will continue to work with health experts including the World Health Organization, and local partners, to make sure that we have the right policies in place to reduce the spread of harmful COVID-19 misinformation on our platform.”

Throughout the pandemic, Facebook has worked closely with the World Health Organization to direct people to authoritative COVID-19 information, and to do more to identify and take action to remove incorrect claims about the virus.