Anti-Vax Ad King Larry Cook Dethroned After Facebook Removes His Posts
Facebook announced Tuesday that it has removed advertisements paid for by Larry Cook—a prominent anti-vaxxer who targeted Washington-area women in ads during a measles outbreak—because the posts violated the social network’s policies.
“These ads were taken down in conjunction with our recently announced efforts to tackle vaccine misinformation on Facebook,” Devon Kearns, who works in policy communications at Facebook, told The Daily Beast. “Several of these ads contained verifiable hoaxes identified by leading global health organizations like the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and were removed.”
Some of the ads included links to stories about children who died hours after receiving vaccines. Others touted natural immunity—becoming immune to a disease or virus by getting infected by it—as a “superior” method of protecting children from sickness.
Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here