Facebook wants to help you get vaxxed

Facebook has unveiled a new plan to help people get vaccinated against COVID-19.

The company is leveraging Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to inform users how and where they can get vaccinated, it announced on Monday, and will soon label all posts discussing the vaccination with a link to official COVID-19 information. It appears to be a step towards fighting COVID-19 misinformation, albeit an entire year after the pandemic hit.

"The data shows the vaccines are safe and they work," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. "They're our best hope for getting past this virus and getting back to normal life. I'm looking forward to getting mine, and I hope you are too."

The company is starting by ramping up its Covid Information Center — the tool it introduced at the beginning of the pandemic, which sits at the top of the News Feed and has information on the disease from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now, it will also show you when and where you can get vaccinated, and it will give you a link to make an appointment.

"We've already seen people use Facebook to find vaccination appointments, so this should enable millions more people to do the same," Zuckerberg said in his statement.

Facebook is partnering with Boston Children’s Hospital and VaccineFinder to help people find nearby places to get the vaccine in the U.S. In other countries, you'll still have access to the Covid Information Center, but won't be able to find vaccine centers in the same way until the shots are more widely available.

The tech giant will also bring the Covid Information Center to Instagram, and will be releasing new stickers on Instagram Stories that are supposed to "inspire others to get vaccinated when it becomes available to them."

Facebook says it will work with governments to expand WhatsApp chatbots to help people register for vaccines. These chatbots are already at work in Argentina, Brazil, and Indonesia.

"More than 3 billion messages related to Covid have already been sent by governments, nonprofits and international organizations to citizens through official WhatsApp chatbots, so this update will help with the vaccination effort as well," Zuckerberg said in his statement.

As part of this move, the platform says it will be labeling all posts about COVID-19 with a banner that points users to its Covid Information Center, which appears to be a sign that Facebook might be taking the spread of anti-vax misinformation more seriously. This comes a day after The Washington Post reported that Facebook was conducting an internal study of vaccine hesitancy. The report found that "in the population segment with the most vaccine hesitancy, just 111 users contributed half of all vaccine hesitant content."

About three weeks ago, the platform decided to clarify its community standards with regards to COVID-19 information in response to a recommendation from the Facebook Oversight Board, an independent entity that rules on content cases across Facebook’s platforms. The move included launching a transparency center to help users better understand the platform’s community standards.