Facebook on August 18 said vaccine “hesitancy” is down by 50 per cent in the US, with significant declines in other countries, and credits its efforts to filter out misinformation and promote authoritative information for helping the trend.

The news comes a month after a public spat between Facebook and the White House after President Joe Biden claimed Facebook was “killing people” by allowing vaccine misinformation to spread.

In releasing its quarterly transparency report, Facebook said it removed some 20 million pieces of content, issuing warnings for millions more, and blocked 3,000 accounts for violating its policies on Covid-19 misinformation, while at the same time connecting users with “reliable sources” of health information.

The company said its machine learning tools continue to make progress in filtering inappropriate content such as hate speech.

Facebook vice-president for integrity Guy Rosen told reporters that the prevalence of violating content – which Facebook claims is the best way to measure its effectiveness in filtering – was just 0.05 per cent in the second quarter of the year.

“Prevalence is our primary metric … it matters because it captures not what we took down but what we missed and what was ultimately seen by people,” he said.