In the midst of the global COVID-19 vaccination campaign, social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter say they have stepped up the fight against disinformation that seeks to undermine confidence in vaccines … but there are numerous problems.
For years, the same platforms allowed anti-vaccination propaganda to flourish, making it difficult to end those feelings now. In addition, its campaigns to eradicate other types of misinformation about COVID-19 with fact-checking, warning signals and other moderate measures have been remarkably slow.
For example, Twitter announced this month that it will erase dangerous lies about vaccines, just as it has done with other conspiracy theories and misinformation related to COVID, but as of April 2020 it has removed only 8,400 tweets in total, a small fraction of the attack. . of lies shot daily to users with millions of followers, critics say.
“While they postpone business, lives are being lost,” said Imran Ahmed, director of the Center for Countering Digital Hate nongovernmental organization. In December, this NGO discovered that 59 million social media accounts follow the promoters of anti-vaccine propaganda, many of whom are hugely popular mega disseminators of disinformation.
In the face of attempts to suppress vaccine misinformation, there are protests against censorship, and some broadcasters are resorting to sneaky tactics to avoid closure.
“It’s a difficult situation because we’ve let it go on for a long time,” said Jeanine Guidry, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor who studies social media and health information. “People who use social media have been able to spread what they want for almost a decade.”
The Associated Press identified more than a dozen Facebook pages and Instagram accounts, which together have millions of followers, who have disseminated false information about the COVID-19 vaccine or discouraged its use. Some of these pages have been around for years.
Of the more than 15 pages identified by NewsGuard, a technology company that analyzes web page credibility, half are still active on Facebook, the AP found.
One of those pages, The Truth About Cancer, with more than a million followers on Facebook, has been circulating unsubstantiated suggestions for years that vaccines can cause autism or other brain damage in children. NewsGuard identified her in November as a “mega-spreader of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine.”
The page did not recently publish information about vaccines and the coronavirus. It now instructs users to subscribe to its newsletter and visit its website in order to avoid so-called “censorship”.
Facebook said it was “taking aggressive measures to combat misinformation in our apps by removing millions of notes about COVID-19 and vaccines from Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic.”
“Research shows that one of the best ways to drive vaccine adoption is to disseminate accurate and reliable information. That’s why we connected 2 billion people with information from health authorities and launched a global information campaign,” said the company in a ruling.
Facebook banned ads discouraging the use of vaccines and said it added warnings to more than 167 million posts about COVID-19 thanks to its network of partners to verify facts. The AP itself is one of Facebook’s fact-checking partners.
YouTube, which has generally avoided the kind of surveillance that other social networks are exposed to, while also being a source of misinformation, said it has removed more than 30,000 videos since October, when it began banning false claims about vaccines. Against COVID-19. . As of February 2020, it has removed more than 800,000 videos related to dangerous or misleading information about the coronavirus, spokeswoman Elena Fernández said.
But before the pandemic, social media had made no attempt to eradicate misinformation, said Andy Pattison, digital solutions manager at the World Health Organization. In 2019, when a measles outbreak devastated the northwestern United States and left dozens of deaths in American Samoa, Pattison pleaded with major tech companies to change vaccine misinformation rules, which he feared would exacerbate the outbreak, but it was in vain.
It wasn’t until after the COVID-19 scourge that many of these companies began to listen. Now he meets weekly with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to analyze trends on their platforms and the measures to be investigated.
“When it comes to vaccine misinformation, the most frustrating thing is that it has been around for years,” said Pattison.
The targets of such repression tend to adapt quickly. Some accounts use misspelled terms such as “vackseen” or “v @ x” to bypass automatic filters and avoid bans (social networks say they are aware of this). Others choose more subtle messages, images or memes to indicate that vaccines are unsafe or even deadly.
“If you die after being vaccinated, you die from anything but the vaccine,” said a meme on an Instagram account with more than 65,000 followers to point out that the US government is hiding deaths from the COVID-19 vaccine .
“There is a very subtle difference between freedom of speech and the erosion of science,” said Pattison. Disinformation broadcasters “learn the rules and are constantly moving around the edges”.