Vaccine wars: social media gets into a fierce battle

SAN FRANCISCO – Like health officials facing epidemics, Internet companies are trying to contain the misinformation about the vaccination they've long been promoting. Until now, their efforts for quarantine have been in vain.

Searches on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram reveal all sorts of false warnings about vaccines, including some well-refuted ideas that they cause autism or that mercury preservatives and other substances that make it worse. they contain can poison and even kill people.

Some experts are concerned that the online dissemination of poor vaccine information may feed or reinforce parents' fears. They suspect that this is contributing to the resurgence of some dangerous childhood diseases, including measles, whooping cough and mumps.

"The online world has been largely overrun with misinformation from worried parents," said Richard Carpiano, a professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Riverside, who studies vaccine trends. . "Doctors do not control the authority they exercised decades ago.There is a lack of trust in the institutions in which people trusted."

The effort of filtering online information about fake vaccines online is an additional front in the battle of social media to fight false news of all kinds, including political propaganda. (Researchers have even discovered that Russia-related robots are trying to sow discord by amplifying both sides of the vaccine debate.)

Pinterest, the digital scrapbooking and search site that has been one of the leading online repositories of vaccine misinformation, has taken a radical step in 2017 by blocking all searches for the term "vaccines".

But it is a quarantine that flees. Recently, the search for "measles vaccine" has once again revealed, among other things, a post titled "Why we said NO to measles vaccine", as well as an ominous illustration of a hand holding a huge needle entitled "Vaccine-nation: poisoning people, one shot at a time."

Meanwhile, Facebook said in March that it would no longer recommend groups and pages that spread hoaxes about vaccines, and that it would reject the advertisements that do it. This seems to have filtered some of the most egregious sources of misinformation about vaccines, such as the Naturalnews.com website.

But even after the changes, the anti-vax groups were among the first results of research on "vaccine safety". A "vaccine" search, for its part, reveals the verified profile of Dr. Christiane Northrup, a physician who openly expresses her doubts about vaccines – and sometimes their opposition.

On Facebook, hashtags such as "vaccineskill" and accounts against child immunization are easy to find with a simple search for "vaccines".

Discredited ideas circulating online include the belief that the recommended number of vaccines for babies is too difficult to manage for the body, that vaccines infect people with the same viruses they are trying to prevent, or that immunity The natural conferred by contracting a disease is better than vaccines.

In truth, fear and suspicion of vaccines have existed since vaccines existed. The inoculations of smallpox provoked a fury in colonial New England in the 1700s. And anti-vaccine agitation existed online well before Facebook and Twitter.

Yet online disinformation experts claim that social networks and the way in which its algorithms broadcast the most "engaging" messages – whether truthful or not – fueled the spread of anti-vaccination propaganda and pushed parents in the anti-vax camp.

Jeanine Guidry, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor of social media and vaccines, said social media amplified these conversations and created echo chambers that could reinforce misinformation.

Carpiano said it was difficult to document the real effect of social media on vaccination rates, but "we're seeing a decline in coverage and an increase in coverage gaps" as well as groups of people reluctant to vaccination.

Despite high-profile epidemics, vaccination rates in the United States remain high overall, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the percentage of children under 2 years old who have not received any vaccine increases.

Some of the fake online information on health and medicine seems to be passed on to people who can really believe it. Some seem destined to sow chaos in public discourse. And some seem to be for a financial gain.

InfoWars, the plot site led by right-wing provocateur Alex Jones, regularly broadcasts anti-vax information and "forced vaccination" stories while selling what is touted as an immune supplement. Naturalnews.com also sells such products.

"It's a misinformation campaign," Carpiano said. "It is often said," We are for choice, understanding and education, "he said." But basically, it's not open to scientific debate. "

– The Associated Press