Social media giant Facebook has announced that it is stepping up its campaign to remove and ban COVID-19 vaccine misinformation to fight distrust in the vaccine rollout.

Facebook's vice-president of integrity Guy Rosen explained that the company would be removing more false claims about COVID-19 and vaccines from its platforms, which also includes Instagram.

Since December, Facebook has removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts.

After consulting with the World Health Organization (WHO) Facebook is now expanding the list of false claims including:

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• COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured

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• Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against

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• It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine

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• Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism

The full list of claims that will be removed is available here.

"We will begin enforcing this policy immediately, with a particular focus on pages, groups and accounts that violate these rules, and we’ll continue to expand our enforcement over the coming weeks," Mr Rosen explained.

"Groups, pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram that repeatedly share these debunked claims may be removed altogether.

"We are also requiring some admins for groups with admins or members who have violated our COVID-19 policies to temporarily approve all posts within their group.

"Claims about COVID-19 or vaccines that do not violate these policies will still be eligible for review by our third-party fact-checkers, and if they are rated false, they will be labelled and demoted."

Do you think Facebook is doing enough to stop the spread of misinformation? Is this latest ban too little too late?