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President Joe Biden’s statement on Friday that social media giants were “killing people” by spreading anti-vaccine content sparked the collapse of conservative media, but by poking fun at its recent hobbyhorse, the White House has certainly right: far-right content, especially anti-vax messages, works very well on these platforms. Especially Facebook.
But one wise move in particular by Team Biden this week appears to have significantly reduced that lead: a White House appearance on Wednesday by pop star Olivia Rodrigo to promote the COVID-19 vaccination.
“We need to reach people, meet people where they are and talk to young people – people under the age of 18,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a briefing.
Even taking only last week, anti-vaccine posts from right-wing figures like Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino topped Facebook’s news feed, garnering hundreds of thousands of interactions, according to data from Crowdtangle, a publicly available analysis tool. by Facebook.
In fact, an analysis of Crowdtangle by political and advertising newsletter FWIW shows that 12 of the top 15 vaccine-related posts on the platform earlier this week were negative. One video in particular dominated Facebook’s algorithm for much of the week: a selfie-style live chat with right-wing expert Candace Owens, in which she encouraged people to leave or get fired from their job. work for flouting immunization rules because “no job is worth your health.” The post has been shared over 130,000 times and currently has over 4 million views.
Enter Olivia Rodrigo.
The appearance of the “good 4 u” singer in the White House has thrown political Twitter into a spin, but it seems the real impact of the strategy has been felt on Facebook – where at least three posts of the event have. catapulted into the platform’s top 15 over the next three days. , according to an analysis from the Salon, while the disinformation-filled video of Candace Owens that was previously all over Facebook fell completely off the table.
The top post on the platform is now a photo of Biden and Rodrigo wearing the President’s iconic aviator sunglasses.
The other two include a video Rodrigo recorded with Dr.Anthony Fauci, the White House COVID-19 adviser, in which the couple read tweets about vaccines, and a selfie of the pop star and Biden, in which she springs from her enthusiasm. be in the White House.
The trend continued on Instagram as well, with the top five interacting the most with posts all related to Rodrigo’s visit to the White House. Although Instagram generally promotes less vaccine misinformation than Facebook, FWIW reported, content related to Rodrigo has elicited far more interactions than previous posts on the platform, with millions of likes and shares.
In fact, Biden-Rodrigo’s top four positions occupy the top spots in the last month, although it has been live for just under three days.
The social media blitz is part of a larger strategy on behalf of the White House digital team, which in recent weeks has decided, alongside its Democratic allies, to be more proactive in tackling disinformation right wing that the president increasingly sees as a threat to the country’s post-COVID recovery process.
Jen Psaki even went so far as to say this week that the administration is in “regular contact” with social media platforms and actively reports “problematic posts” for Facebook superiors.
“It’s disturbing, but it’s a persistent narrative that we are seeing,” she said. “We want to know that social media platforms are taking action to address this.”
On Thursday, the CDC reports that 55.8% of Americans have received at least one dose of the vaccine – while 48.3% of the country is fully vaccinated – a 0.6% increase from the previous week.
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