Platforms' policies on health misinformation

This EU DisinfoLab factsheet compares how five platforms designated as Very Large Online Platforms under the Digital Services Act - Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and X/Twitter - define and address health misinformation in their policies. Rather than measuring prevalence or enforcement outcomes empirically, the analysis maps policy language and notes the inherent difficulty of separating health-specific rules from platforms' broader misinformation frameworks.

It finds that policy infrastructure built during the COVID-19 pandemic has largely persisted and remains applicable to other public health emergencies, with vaccine-related misinformation continuing to be treated as a priority enforcement area across the platforms studied. The comparison highlights that platforms generally rely on layered approaches combining labeling, reduced distribution, and removal rather than a single uniform mechanism.

The report concludes that maintaining and enforcing these pandemic-era policies remains important for protecting public health even as acute pandemic urgency has faded, though it stops short of offering quantitative data on how effectively the policies are enforced in practice.