Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta has removed the accounts of influential American anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense (CDH), headed by Robert Kennedy Jr., nephew of former President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, from those two platforms.
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“We have deleted the Instagram and Facebook accounts in question for repeated violations of our COVID-19 guidelines,” Aaron Simpson, a spokesman for Meta, told AFP on Thursday.
The CDH, which criticizes the safety of vaccines against COVID-19, accuses Meta of not respecting his right to freedom of expression and joining the American health authorities.
“Facebook comes 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.
The nephew of the former president who was assassinated in 1963 and the son of a former minister who was also assassinated in 1968, he is an important figure in America’s anti-vaccination galaxy.
CDH claims “hundreds of thousands” of subscribers on these two accounts and shared screenshots in its press release showing the deletion of these accounts for “misinformation.”
According to the CDH, the ban could be related to a lawsuit brought by the organization against Meta for censorship in federal court.
CDH’s YouTube channel was shut down last September.
Meta, which is regularly criticized for spreading disinformation, has been trying to move away from political content and focus on exchanges between loved ones and communities of interest since the last US presidential election.