As social media companies wrestle with how to police dangerous health misinformation on their platforms, Pinterest has taken an extreme approach: blocking search results related to vaccinations, whether the results are medically accurate or not.
The San Francisco-based company told the Wall Street Journal it’s been suppressing search results on the topic since December and will continue to do so until it finds a reliable solution to protect Pinterest users from harmful and misleading content. Pinterest searches about vaccines had been dominated by results that bucked long-standing scientific research and guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control by claiming vaccinations were hazardous.