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Vaccination advocates and disinformation researchers have been waiting for years for Facebook to take action against the most important and influential anti-vaccination pages.
So it was with some trepidation that they greeted the news that the social network had banned some of the most popular and prolific anti-vaccination accounts last week – pages that had also pushed misinformation about the Covid vaccination. -19 to millions of people.
Their impact, however, continues. While extremism researchers and public health advocates view the removal of larger anti-vaccination accounts as mostly positive, new research shows the biggest threat to public confidence in a Covid-19 vaccine comes from smaller and better connected Facebook groups that have gravitated towards anti-vaccination messaging in recent months.
“What we are seeing playing with Covid is what was already in the system,” said Neil Johnson, a physicist at George Washington University who studies extremism online. “He was prepared for this at the end of 2019.”
With many Covid-19 vaccines in the works, health officials have warned that public adoption will be crucial to ensuring that a sufficient population is vaccinated to stop the spread of the virus. Experts say there is no exact threshold for the percentage of people who need to get vaccinated to stop the spread of the virus, but it is expected to reach at least 60% of the population.
But public opinion on vaccines is mixed. According to a YouGov poll released in August, only 42% of Americans said ‘yes’ to whether they would receive a Covid-19 vaccine when it becomes available. A Pew Research Center poll released in September found a significant drop from May to September in people who said they would receive the vaccine if it was immediately available.
Johnson and a team of researchers published an article in Nature in May that suggested that the anti-vaccination movement bore great responsibility for such reluctance. He showed that although membership in online anti-vaccination groups was smaller than in pro-vaccination groups, they were more numerous, their messages were more diverse, emotional and often compelling, and they were better at disseminating these. posts outside of their groups, meaning they were able to reach more people.
Research from a forthcoming article by Johnson and his team, currently being revised for publication, shows that members of communities previously thought to be unrelated or “undecided” about vaccines – groups for animal lovers, school groups of parents, yoga fans and foodies, for example – are increasingly connected with the anti-vaccination movement.
“It’s like tumor growth,” Johnson said.
While anti-vaccination campaigners’ preferred platform, Facebook, recently took a number of steps to limit the reach of anti-vaccine content, the movement flourished during the pandemic – success largely due to a pivot towards the Covid-19 disinformation and a communications strategy that allows the anti-vaccination message to bypass platform policy enforcement and reach users outside its network.
Facebook spokesperson Andrea Vallone said in an emailed statement the company has worked to connect people with accurate vaccine information and ban deceptive ads.
“We also continue to eliminate misinformation about COVID-19 that could lead to imminent physical harm and direct people to our COVID information center, which is available in 189 countries,” she said. declared.
A report from the London-based nonprofit, Center for Countering Digital Hate, found that the anti-vaccination movement has gained around 8 million followers since 2019. Conspiracy theories on an upcoming Covid-19 vaccine have flooded social media, especially Instagram and Facebook, according to a new report from First Draft, a global nonprofit that researches disinformation online.
Such conspiracy theories (which claimed that the vaccine was a smart cover for various forms of population control by a government “deep state”, private philanthropists, or even Satan) were not limited to fringe anti-vaccine groups, a reported First Draft, but resonated with outside networks. Disparate communities, including libertarian, New Age, QAnon and anti-government groups, as well as more traditional communities, appear to be uniting around opposition to an upcoming Covid-19 vaccine.
The biggest pages banned by Facebook were already preparing for a crackdown.
Facebook deleted the page for the online anti-vaccination show The HighWire this month for violating policies on “disinformation that can cause physical harm,” the company said. YouTube had removed the channel from the show in July after host Del Bigtree downplayed the severity of the coronavirus pandemic on his show and suggested viewers intentionally expose themselves to Covid-19.
According to a post on Bigtree’s nonprofit organization’s Facebook page, Informed Consent Action Network, The HighWire had posted more than 500 videos that garnered more than 30 million views. The page had 360,500 subscribers when it was deleted.
A HighWire account remains active on Instagram owned by Facebook, where it has 199,000 followers. Bigtree did not return a request for comment.
But it wasn’t vaccine misinformation that banned Facebook this month’s most popular and prolific anti-vaccination activist from social media. Ultimately, after years of building an audience on Facebook, Larry Cook, a social media marketer in California, and his 200,000-member private group, Stop Mandatory Vaccination, were taken down for violating the policies of the platform against the promotion of QAnon conspiracy theory.
Cook, who did not respond to a request for comment, had warned fans of an upcoming ban and had been promoting his accounts on 11 other alternative platforms for months.
The Cook and Bigtree pages and groups had continued to grow on Facebook despite an initiative in March 2019 to reduce the reach of anti-vaccine content during a measles outbreak and subsequent measures during the pandemic to reduce misinformation about the disease. health in reaction to World Health Organization warnings against “Conspiracy theorists who push disinformation and undermine the response to the epidemic.”
The researchers observed that the live streaming features allowed anti-vaccine campaigners to continue to reach their audiences. Covid-19 in particular has also led to important follow-ups for prominent anti-vaccine figures, said Renee DiResta, who studies disinformation as a research officer at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
“The anti-vaccine movement has recognized that [Covid-19] was an opportunity to create content, so when people searched for it, they found anti-vaccine content, ”she says. “They saw this as an opportunity not only to erode confidence in the Covid vaccine, but also to make people hesitant about routinely immunizing children.”
But efforts to go beyond Facebook have had limited success.
Their audiences “may not know where to go and how to navigate to these platforms,” said Kolina Koltai, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, which studies the anti-vaccine movement.
Despite the promotion, only a handful of users have followed Cook and Bigtree on these new platforms.
“Too many people are deeply invested in Facebook, which has the distinct advantage because it’s the platform people are on, it’s easy to navigate and it’s how users stay connected with their friends. and their families, ”Koltai said.
And users don’t need to switch platforms to stay connected to the larger anti-vaccination movement. There remains an unknown number of private groups, spaces that have been centers of disinformation regarding Covid-19 and vaccines. These include the 224,000-member Immunization Re-education Discussion Forum, a private anti-vaccination group focused exclusively on Covid-19 vaccines.
“It’s like an insurgency,” Johnson said. “And the hardest part about fighting an insurgency is that we never really knew where they were. There was almost like an invisible network behind them. Often times, the most important groups, the ones that caught your eye because they were the most important, didn’t necessarily mean they were the most important in the network. “
His new research shows that the anti-vaccination movement has effectively used the pandemic to reach over 100 million sensitive Facebook users and appears to be winning the battle for hearts and minds.
As such, banning accounts with many subscribers is unlikely to have a real impact on the wider anti-vaccination movement.
“The anti-vaccination network is all about passing stories, passing stories, supporting each other, just like an insurgency,” Johnson said. “And just like an insurgency, it’s sort of embedded in the civilian population. And that’s their strength.”
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