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Wednesday morning, Adam Schiff, powerful chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, joined journalists around the world in one even nascent Twitter: he searched for "vaccine" on Facebook and posted a screenshot of the results.
The results of Schiff's research were indeed alarming: suggestions for automatic sentence entry such as "Immunization Rehabilitation Discussion Forum", a group called "Parents Against Immunization" and the page of the National Center for Immunization. information on vaccines, an official polling agency dedicated to the promotion of anti-vaccines. Propaganda. And while search results on Facebook are personalized for each user, a recent Guardian report revealed equally biased results for a brand new account.
If the congressman had tried to look for "vaccines" on the rival Pinterest social networking site, he would have had little more than a blank blank screen to capture. Recognizing that search results for a number of vaccine-related terms were wrong, Pinterest responded by "breaking" its own search tool.
While Facebook is putting more and more pressure on its role in promoting anti-vaccine misinformation, Pinterest offers an example of a radically different approach to managing health misinformation on social media.
"We're a place where people come to find inspiration, and there's nothing inspiring about harmful content," said Ifeoma Ozoma, Public Policy and Social Impact Leader at Pinterest. "In our opinion, we are not the platform for this."
Adam Schiff
(@RepAdamSchiff)Last week, I wrote to Facebook and Google expressing my concern that their sites are directing users to bad news that discourages vaccinations and harms public health.
The search results you get for "vaccines" on Facebook are a dramatic illustration. pic.twitter.com/ZrEQfVTaRo
It has not always been the case. The visual social network was the subject of close scrutiny in 2016 after a scientific study revealed that 75% of the positions related to vaccines were negative. The following year, Pinterest updated its "Community Guidelines" to explicitly prohibit "promoting false treatments for terminal or chronic diseases and anti-vaccination counseling" as part of 39, a broader policy against misinformation that "has immediate and detrimental effects on the pinner's health or on the public". security".
The policy change allowed Pinterest to deploy a number of technological approaches to combat anti-vaxx propaganda. The company has banned boards of directors from a number of well-known anti-vaccine propagandists, including the National Vaccine Information Center and Larry Cook, who runs the Stop Facebook website and Facebook group. Mandatory Vaccination ".
However, retroactive application of content rules is only one aspect of the company's approach.
Take search results. The phenomenon presented in screenshots of search results on Facebook is known in tech circles as a "data vacuum," according to an article by Data & Society's founder and researcher, Danah Boyd. "Some relevant data is limited, non-existent or deeply problematic," says Boyd.
In the case of vaccines, the fact that scientists and doctors do not produce a constant stream of new digital content over established science has left a void for conspiracy theorists and fraudsters to fill with alarmist propaganda and misinformation.
Missing data can be relatively easy to diagnose, but it is very difficult to correct.
"Data gaps can not be addressed by removing problematic content, not only because deleting it could defeat search engine goals, but also because it would not work," he said. Boyd writes. "Without high-quality content to replace deleted content, new malicious content can easily surface."
Pinterest responded by creating a "blacklist" of "polluted" search terms.
"We are doing our best to remove bad content, but we know that there is still bad content," said Ifeoma Ozoma, Public Policy and Social Impact Leader at Pinterest. "We do not want to bring that up with search terms like" cancer treatment "or" suicide. "We hope to be able to move from the destruction of the site to the mere coverage of good content. ;is preferable. "
Pinterest also includes health misinformation images in its "hash bank", preventing users from re-pinning previously reported and deleted anti-vaxx memes. (Hashing is a technology that assigns a unique digital ID to images and videos, and is more widely used to prevent the spread of pedophile images and terrorist content.)
And the company banned all the pins from certain websites.
"If a website is fully dedicated to spreading false health information, we do not want it on our platform, so we can block URLs," Ozoma said.
Users simply can not "pin" a link to StopMandatoryVaccinations.com or the "alternative health" sites Mercola.com, HealthNutNews.com and or GreedMedInfo.com; If they try, they receive an error message saying "Invalid Settings."
Pinterest is by no means free of misinformation. The Guardian was able to find anti-vaccine propaganda on the site by searching for various terms that had not been blacklisted, such as "MMR", the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.
Ozoma said that one of the challenges was the amount of anti-vaxx material that was at odds with what she termed "big social media platforms and big video platforms," rather than independent sites, because Pinterest does not want to cut everything cross-posting content hosted by Facebook or YouTube.
"This has not been a goal for other platforms," said Ozoma, "we have been working on it since 2017, but we have been left alone, hopefully there will be more discussions ahead.
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