Facebook launches global campaign to help people get vaccinated against Covid-19

Facebook has launched a global campaign to help people get vaccinated against Covid-19, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced.

“We're launching a global campaign to help bring 50 million people a step closer to getting Covid-19 vaccines,” the Facebook CEO said in a post.

“We've already connected over 2 billion people to authoritative Covid-19 information. Now that many countries are moving towards vaccinations for all adults, we're working on tools to make it easier for everyone to get vaccinated as well,” he said.

As part of the campaign, the social media major is launching a tool that shows users when and where they can get vaccinated. The tool will also provide users a link to help them make an appointment.

“This will be in the Covid Information Center, which we'll show people right in their News Feed. We've already seen people use Facebook to find vaccination appointments, so this should enable millions more people to do the same,” explained Zuckerberg.

It is also launching its Covid Information Center on its photo-sharing platform Instagram. It launched the information centre on the Facebook app last March. The portal helps people discover the latest information about the virus from local health ministries and the World Health Organisation, Facebook said in a blog post.

It is also launching new stickers on Instagram Stories to encourage people to get vaccinated when it becomes available to them. The sticker will connect people directly to the Information Center.

The tech giant is also working with health authorities and governments to expand their WhatsApp chatbots to help people register for vaccines.

“More than 3 billion messages related to Covid have already been sent by governments, non-profits and international organisations to citizens through official WhatsApp chatbots, so this update will help with the vaccination effort as well,” the Facebook CEO said.

It will also add labels to Facebook and Instagram posts that discuss the Covid-19 vaccines to show additional information from the World Health Organisation.

The label is rolling out globally in English, Spanish, Indonesian, Portuguese, Arabic and French, and we are adding additional languages in the coming weeks.

“In the coming weeks, we’re rolling out labels on all posts about Covid-19 vaccines that point people to the Covid-19 Information Center globally, and plan to add additional targeted labels about vaccine subtopics,” it said in a blog post.

“We will also add an additional screen when someone goes to share a post on Facebook and Instagram with an informational vaccine label. It will provide more information so people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to share,” it said.

Apart from this, the platform is also adding new data and insights related to vaccine attitudes to Facebook’s Data for Good’s Covid-19 map and dashboard.

This will make near-real-time data on aggregate trends in vaccinations, intent to get vaccinated and reasons for hesitancy available to public officials, it said.

“These visualisations are designed to provide information to inform and monitor vaccine roll-outs in over 200 countries and territories. The dashboard is updated in near real-time with data collected by our partners at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland as part of the Covid-19 Symptom Survey,” it said.

Apart from this, it is also making it easier to track how Covid-19 information is spread on social media through CrowdTangle’s Covid-19 Live Displays.

“Publishers, global aid organisations, journalists and others can access real-time, global streams of vaccine-related posts on Facebook, Instagram and Reddit in 34 languages,” it said.