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As COVID-19 vaccination in full swing, social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter say they have stepped up their fight against misinformation that aims to undermine trust in vaccines. But problems abound.
For years, the same platforms have allowed anti-vaccination propaganda will grow, making it difficult to eliminate such feelings now. And their efforts to weed out other types of COVID-19 misinformation – often with fact checks, informational labels, and other restraints – have been woefully slow.
Twitter, for example, announced this month that it will suppress dangerous lies about vaccines, in much the same way as other COVID-related conspiracy theories and misinformation. But since April 2020, it has deleted a grand total of 8,400 tweets spreading COVID-related disinformation – a tiny fraction of the avalanche of pandemic-related lies tweeted daily by popular users with millions of followers, according to the reports. reviews.
“Although they don’t take action, lives are lost,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a watchdog group. In December, the nonprofit discovered that 59 million accounts on social platforms follow anti-vax propaganda peddlers – many of whom are hugely popular super-disseminators of disinformation.
Efforts to crack down on vaccine misinformation now, however, are generating cries of censorship and prompting some posters to adopt underhanded tactics to avoid the ax.
“It’s a tough situation because we’ve let this go for so long,” said Jeanine Guidry, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies social media and health information. “People who use social media have really been able to share what they wanted for almost a decade.”
The Associated Press has identified more than a dozen Facebook pages and Instagram accounts, collectively with millions of subscribers, who have made false statements about the COVID-19 vaccine or discouraged people from taking it. Some of these pages have been around for years.
Of the more than 15 pages identified by NewsGuard, a technology company that analyzes website credibility, about half remain active on Facebook, the AP found.
One of those pages, The Truth About Cancer, has more than a million followers on Facebook after years of posting baseless suggestions that vaccines could cause autism or damage children’s brains. The page was identified in November as a “super spreader of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation” by NewsGuard.
Recently, the page stopped posting on vaccines and the coronavirus. He now encourages people to sign up for his newsletter and visit his website in order to avoid so-called “censorship”.
Facebook said it was taking “aggressive steps to combat disinformation in our apps by removing millions of COVID-19 and vaccine content from Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic.”
“Research shows that one of the best ways to promote vaccine acceptance is to show people accurate and reliable information, which is why we have connected 2 billion people to health authority resources and launched a campaign to ‘global information,’ the company said in a statement. .
Facebook has also banned ads discouraging vaccines and said it has added warning labels to more than 167 million additional COVID-19 content through our network of fact-checking partners. (The Associated Press is one of Facebook’s fact-checking partners).
YouTube, which has generally avoided the same kind of review as its social media peers despite being a source of disinformation, said it has removed more than 30,000 videos since October, when it began banning fake COVID-19 vaccinations statements. Since February 2020, he has removed more than 800,000 videos related to dangerous or misleading coronavirus information, said YouTube spokeswoman Elena Hernandez.
Before the pandemic, however, social media platforms had done little to stamp out disinformation, said Andy Pattison, head of digital solutions for the World Health Organization. In 2019, as a measles outbreak hit the Pacific Northwest and claimed dozens of lives in American Samoa, Pattison pleaded with big tech companies to take a closer look at tightening the rules around disinformation on vaccines which he says could worsen the epidemic – to no avail.
It wasn’t until COVID-19 struck with vengeance that many of these tech companies started listening. Now he meets with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube weekly to discuss the trends on their platforms and policies to consider.
“When it comes to vaccine misinformation, what’s really frustrating is that it’s been around for years,” Pattison said.
The targets of these repressive measures are often quick to adapt. Some accounts use intentionally misspelled words – like “vackseen” or “v @ x” – to avoid bans. (Social platforms say they are wise in this regard.) Other pages use more subtle posts, images or memes to suggest that vaccines are dangerous or even deadly.
“When you die from the vaccine, you die from everything except the vaccine,” read a meme on an Instagram account with more than 65,000 followers. The post suggested the government is covering up deaths from the COVID-19 vaccine.
“It’s a very fine line between free speech and the erosion of science,” Pattison said. Misinformation providers, he said, “learn the rules, and they’re dancing on the edge, all the time.”
Twitter said it is continually reviewing its rules in the context of COVID-19 and changing them based on expert advice. Earlier this month, he added a strike policy that threatens repeated spreaders of coronavirus and vaccine misinformation with bans.
But false information about COVID-19 continues to emerge. Earlier this month, several articles circulating online claimed that more elderly Israelis who had taken the Pfizer vaccine were “killed” by the gunshot than those who had died from COVID-19 itself. One such post from an anti-vaccination website was shared nearly 12,000 times on Facebook, leading earlier this month to a spike of nearly 40,000 mentions of ‘vaccine deaths’ on social and media platforms. on the Internet, according to an analysis by the media intelligence firm Zignal Labs. .
Medical experts point to real-world study showing a strong correlation between vaccination and the reduction of severe disease COVID-19 in Israel. The country’s health ministry said in a statement on Thursday that the COVID-19 vaccine had “profoundly” reduced the rate of deaths and hospitalizations.
As vaccine stocks in the United States continue to increase, immunization efforts will soon shift from targeting a limited supply to the most vulnerable populations to injecting as many vaccines into as many. weapons as possible. That means going after the third of the nation’s population who say they won’t or likely won’t get it, as measured by a February-AP-NORC. survey.
“Vaccine reluctance and misinformation could be a major obstacle to vaccinating enough of the population to end the crisis,” said Lisa Fazio, professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University .
Some health officials and academics generally find the social platform’s efforts to be useful, at least on the fringes. What is not clear is the extent of the breach they can put into the problem.
“If someone really believes the COVID vaccine is harmful and feels responsible for sharing it with friends and family … they’ll find a way,” Guidry said.
And some still blame the business models they say have encouraged platforms to provide misinformation, if not false, about coronaviruses in order to profit from advertising.
When the Center for Countering Digital Hate recently investigated the intersection of different types of disinformation and hate speech, it found that Instagram tends to intersect with disinformation through its algorithm. Instagram could feed into an account that followed a QAnon conspiracy site from other posts by, for example, white nationalists or anti-vaxxers.
“You continue to allow things to fall apart due to the transparent mix of disinformation and information on your platforms,” said Ahmed, the CEO of the center.
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