You Can Now Find Reliable Information About Vaccines on Pinterest
Until recently, Pinterest blocked vaccine search results on its platform. But today the company announced that it would provide “reliable vaccine results” for those searches , and nothing else.
The good news is that you can now find and pin information from the World Health Organization, the Vaccine Safety Network, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Their results will appear when you enter the search term “vaccines” or related keywords such as “measles”. These searches also contain the message on the page:
Pins on this topic often violate our community guidelines against harmful medical misinformation.
Because of this, we have limited our search results to pins from globally recognized healthcare organizations.
If you need medical advice, contact your healthcare provider.
Other searches like “cancer cure” still don’t return any results, just this message:
Pins on this topic often violate our community guidelines against harmful medical misinformation. In some cases, we may not show search results for this topic at all.
If you find any content that you think violates Pinterest’s policies, please let us know. Our compliance policies and guidelines are informed by internationally recognized agencies including CDC, WHO and AAP.
If you need medical advice, contact your healthcare provider.
While Pinterest’s new policy is definitely a step up from the previous one, Pinterest is still not a science-based health information wonderland. If you enter the query “measles”, you will receive verified vaccine information. But if you type in the query “chickenpox,” the results show slightly less scientific findings, including one that claims vitamin C prevents disease.
Perhaps they are still working on it. A few minutes ago, a search for “cancer” found icons for foods that are believed to cause cancer. I just reloaded the page and am now getting mostly zodiac related icons. On the other hand, the search term “cancer drugs” is not blocked and brings up some less than scientific conclusions (for example, the suggestion that ginger tea kills cancer cells). To report a pin that violates Pinterest guidelines, click on the pin and use the three-dot menu to report “medical misinformation”.