(Washington) The parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Meta, has removed from these two platforms the accounts of the influential American anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense (CDH), led by Robert Kennedy Jr, nephew of former President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Posted at 6:00 p.m.
“We have removed the Instagram and Facebook accounts in question for repeated violations of our COVID-19 policies,” Aaron Simpson, a spokesperson for Meta, said Thursday.
CDH, which criticizes the safety of vaccines against COVID-19, accuses Meta of not respecting his right to freedom of expression, aligning himself with American health authorities.
“Facebook is acting here as a representative of the federal government’s crusade to silence any criticism of the government’s draconian policies,” the organization’s founder, Robert Kennedy Jr, said in a statement.
Nephew of the former president assassinated in 1963 and son of a former senator, also assassinated in 1968, he is a major figure in the American anti-vaccine galaxy.
CDH claims “hundreds of thousands” of subscribers on these two accounts and shared, in its press release, screenshots showing the deletion of these accounts for “disinformation”.
According to CDH, the ban could be linked to a lawsuit brought by the organization against Meta, for censorship, in federal court.
CDH’s YouTube channel was taken down last September.
Meta, which is regularly criticized for spreading disinformation, has been trying since the last US presidential election to move away from political content to focus on exchanges between relatives and communities of interest.