With vaccination against COVID-19 in full swing, social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter say they have stepped up their fight against misinformation that seeks to undermine trust. in vaccines. But problems abound.
For years, the same platforms have allowed anti-vaccination propaganda to flourish, making it difficult to eliminate such feelings now. And their efforts to eliminate other types of misinformation COVID-19 – often with fact checks, information labels and other restrictive measures – have been extremely slow.
Twitter, for example, announced this month that it will eliminate dangerous vaccine fakes, as with other conspiracy theories related to COVID and misinformation. But since April 2020, it has removed a total of 8,400 tweets spreading COVID-related misinformation – a small part of the avalanche of pandemic-related falsehoods sent daily by popular users with millions of followers, critics say.
“While they are failing to take action, lives are being lost,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Combating Digital Hatred, a surveillance group. In December, the nonprofit found that 59 million social media accounts target anti-vax propaganda traffickers – many of whom are extremely popular disinformation overseers.
However, efforts to combat vaccine misinformation now generate shouts of censorship and lead some posters to adopt hidden tactics to avoid the ax.
“It’s a difficult situation because we’ve been leaving this 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 want for almost a decade.”
The Associated Press has identified more than a dozen Facebook pages and Instagram accounts that collectively boast millions of followers who have made false claims 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 the credibility of websites, about half remain active on Facebook, the AP found.
One such page, Truth About Cancer, has more than a million followers on Facebook, after years of posting unfounded suggestions that vaccines could cause autism or affect 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 about vaccines and coronavirus. He now urges people to sign up for the newsletter and visit his website as a way to avoid alleged “censorship”.
Facebook said it was taking “aggressive measures to combat misinformation in all our applications by removing millions of pieces of COVID-19 and vaccine content on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic.”
“Research shows that one of the best ways to promote vaccine acceptance is by showing people accurate and reliable information, which is why we have connected 2 billion people to resources from health authorities and launched a global information campaign.” the company said in a statement. .
Facebook has also banned ads that discourage vaccines and said it has added warning labels to more than 167 million additional COVID-19 content thanks to our network of fact-finding partners. (The Associated Press is one of Facebook’s fact-finding partners).
YouTube, which has generally avoided the same type of review as its social media colleagues, despite being a source of misinformation, said it removed more than 30,000 videos in October when it began banning false claims about COVID-19 vaccinations. Since February 2020, it has removed more than 800,000 videos related to dangerous or misleading information about the coronavirus, said YouTube spokeswoman Elena Hernandez.
Before the pandemic, however, social media did not do much to eliminate misinformation, said Andy Pattison, digital solutions manager for the World Health Organization. In 2019, as a measles outbreak hit the Northwest Pacific and left dozens dead in American Samoa, Pattison called on major technology companies to take a closer look at tougher vaccine misinformation rules. he feared it could worsen the outbreak – to no avail.
It wasn’t until COVID-19 retaliated that many of those tech companies began to listen. He now meets weekly with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to discuss trends on their platforms and policies to consider.
“When it comes to misinforming the vaccine, it’s really frustrating that it’s been around for years,” Pattison said.
The targets of such repressions are often quick to adapt. Some accounts use intentionally misspelled words – such as “vackseen” or “v @ x” – to avoid bans. (Social platforms say they are wise in this regard.) Other pages use more subtle messages, images, or memes to suggest that vaccines are unsafe or even lethal.
“When you die after the vaccine, you die of anything but the vaccine,” a meme read on an Instagram account with more than 65,000 followers. The station suggested that the government hide the deaths caused by the COVID-19 vaccine.
“It’s a very fine line between free speech and the erosion of science,” Pattison said. Disinformation providers, he said, “learn the rules and dance right on the sidelines, all the time.”
Twitter has said it is constantly reviewing its rules in the context of COVID-19 and amending them based on expert guidance. Earlier this month, he added a strike policy that threatens the repeated spread of coronavirus and disinformation of the banned vaccine.
But the false information COVID-19 blatantly continues to appear. Earlier this month, several articles circulating online claimed that more elderly Israelis who received the Pfizer vaccine were “killed” by gunfire than those who died from COVID-19. Such an article on an anti-vaccination website was distributed almost 12,000 times on Facebook, leading earlier this month to an increase of almost 40,000 mentions of “vaccine deaths” on social platforms and the Internet, according to an analysis of the media information company Zignal Labs.
Medical experts indicate a real-world study showing a strong correlation between vaccination and the decrease in severe COVID-19 disease in Israel. The national health ministry said in a statement on Thursday that the COVID-19 vaccine had “profoundly” reduced the death rate and hospitalizations.
As the US vaccine supply continues to grow, immunization efforts will soon shift from targeting a limited supply to the most vulnerable populations to getting as many shots in as many arms as possible. That means addressing the country’s third population that says it won’t or probably won’t, as measured by a February AP-NORC. survey.
“Hesitation and misinformation of the vaccine could be a major barrier to sufficient vaccination of the population to end the crisis,” said Lisa Fazio, a psychology professor at Vanderbilt University.
Some health officials and academics generally consider the efforts of the social platform to be useful, at least on the sidelines. What is not clear is how big it can be called into question.
“If anyone really believes that the COVID vaccine is harmful and feels the responsibility to share it with friends and family … they will find a way,” Guidry said.
And some are still blaming business models that they say have encouraged platforms to serve captivating, if false, coronavirus misinformation to profit from advertising.
When the Center for Digital Hate Countering recently studied the crossover between different types of misinformation and hate speech, it found that Instagram tended to cross-pollinate misinformation through its algorithm. Instagram could fuel an account that followed a QAnon conspiracy site and other posts from, say, white nationalists or anti-vaxxers.
“Continue to allow things to disintegrate due to the constant mixing of misinformation and information on your platforms,” said Ahmed, the center’s CEO.