With the vaccination against COVID-19 in full swing, social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter claim that they have intensified their fight against disinformation that aims to undermine confidence vaccines. But the problems abound.
For years, the same platforms have allowed anti-vaccination propaganda to flourish, making it difficult to suppress such feelings now. And its efforts to eliminate other types of disinformation from COVID-19 – often with fact checking, information labels and other restrictive measures, have been terribly slow.
Twitter, for example, announced this month which will remove dangerous falsehoods about vaccines, just as it is for other COVID-related conspiracy and misinformation theories. But since April 2020, he has removed a total of 8,400 tweets spreading COVID-related misinformation – a small fraction of the avalanche of pandemic-related falsehoods tweeted daily by popular users with millions of followers, critics say.
“As long as they don’t act, lives are being lost,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a watchdog group. In December, the nonprofit found that 59 million accounts on social platforms follow street vendors of antivax advertising – many of whom are hugely popular propagators of disinformation.
Efforts to crack down on misinformation about vaccines now, however, are generating screams of censure and prompting some posters to adopt stealthy tactics to avoid the ax.
“It’s a difficult situation because we put it off for too 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, collectively boasting 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 more than 15 pages identified by NewsGuard, a technology company that analyzes the credibility of websites, about half remain active on Facebook, AP found.
One such page, The Truth About Cancer, has more than a million followers on Facebook after years of posting baseless suggestions that vaccines can cause autism or damage children’s brains. The page was identified in November as a “super propagator of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation” by NewsGuard.
Recently, the page stopped posting about vaccines and the coronavirus. Now he directs people to sign up for his newsletter and visit his website as a way to avoid the alleged “censorship”.
Facebook said it is taking “aggressive steps to combat misinformation in our apps, removing millions of pieces 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 resources from health authorities and launched a global information campaign,” said the company in a statement.
Facebook also banned ads that discourage vaccines and said it added warning labels to more than 167 million pieces of additional COVID-19 content, thanks to our network of fact-checking partners. (The Associated Press is one of Facebook’s fact-checking partners).
YouTube, which generally avoids the same kind of scrutiny as its social media colleagues, despite being a source of misinformation, said it has removed more than 30,000 videos since October, when it began banning false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines. Since February 2020, he 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 platforms did little to eliminate misinformation, said Andy Pattison, manager of digital solutions for the World Health Organization. In 2019, when a measles outbreak hit the Pacific Northwest and left dozens of people killed in American Samoa, Pattison begged big technology companies to take a closer look at the stricter rules around vaccine misinformation that he feared could worsen the outbreak – to no avail.
It was not until COVID-19 attacked with full force that many of these technology companies began to hear. Now he meets weekly with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to discuss trends in their platforms and policies to be considered.
“When it comes to misinformation about vaccines, what is really frustrating is that it has been around for years,” said Pattison.
The targets of such repressions tend to adapt quickly. Some accounts intentionally use misspelled words – such as “vackseen” or “v @ x” – to avoid prohibitions. (Social platforms say they are wise about this.) Other pages use more subtle messages, images or memes to suggest that vaccines are not safe or even deadly.
“When you die after the vaccine, you die of everything but the vaccine,” said a meme on an Instagram account with more than 65,000 followers. The post suggested that the government is hiding deaths from the COVID-19 vaccine.
“It’s a very fine line between freedom of speech and the erosion of science,” said Pattison. Disinformation providers, he said, “learn the rules and they dance on the edge, all the time.”
Twitter said it is continually 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 repeated disseminators of coronavirus and disinformation of vaccines with bans.
But COVID-19 blatantly false information continues to appear. Earlier this month, several articles that circulated online claimed that more elderly Israelis who took the Pfizer vaccine were “shot dead” than those who died from COVID-19 itself. One of those articles on an anti-vaccination website was shared almost 12,000 times on Facebook, leading to a peak of almost 40,000 mentions of “vaccine deaths” earlier this month on social platforms and the Internet, according to an analysis by the intelligence firm of Zignal Labs media.
Medical experts point to a real-world study showing a strong correlation between vaccination and decreases in severe COVID-19 disease 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 the supply of vaccines in the United States continues to increase, immunization efforts will soon shift from targeting a limited supply to the most vulnerable populations to getting the most vaccines on as many weapons as possible. That means attacking the third of the country’s population who say they won’t or probably won’t, as measured by a February AP-NORC survey.
“Vaccination hesitation and misinformation can be a major barrier to being able to vaccinate enough of the population to end the crisis,” said Lisa Fazio, professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University.
Some health officials and academics generally believe that the social platform’s efforts are useful, at least on the margins. What is not clear is how much they can affect the problem.
“If someone really believes that the COVID vaccine is harmful and feels the responsibility to share it with friends and family … they will find a way,” said Guidry.
And some still blame the business models that, they say, have encouraged platforms to provide engaging, albeit false, misinformation about the coronavirus in order to profit from advertising.
When the Center for Countering Digital Hate recently studied the cross between different types of misinformation and hate speech, he found that Instagram tended to cross-pollinate incorrect information through its algorithm. Instagram can feed an account that followed a QAnon conspiracy website with more posts from, say, white nationalists or anti-xxxxxers.
“You continue to allow things to disintegrate because of the perfect mix of misinformation and information on your platforms,” said Ahmed, the center’s CEO.