Misinformation 'superspreaders': Covid vaccine Push K.K.K. Hoods Mask

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Researchers say that some of the most powerful anti-vaccine messaging operates by selectively presenting real data and anecdotes that foster doubt, rather than sharing explicitly false claims. Instagram has a huge Covid-19 vaccine problem Anna-Sophia Harling, NewsGuard “The trick with vaccine hesitancy: it’s not always misinformation. It’s not always things that are demonstrably untrue. It’s stuff that makes you question and doubt,” said Kolina Koltai, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public who has studied anti-vaccine activists on social media since 2015. Other activists identified by researchers as “super-spreaders” of coronavirus vaccine misinformation also had their Facebook accounts removed this year, but continue to operate Instagram accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, including the British conspiracy theorist David Icke and American anti-vaxx activist Sherri Tenpenny. “A lot of the accounts that were removed from the Facebook platform remain active on Instagram, with enormous follower counts,” Anna-Sophia Harling, the head of Europe for NewsGuard, a company that rates the accuracy and trustworthiness of news websites, and that also produces public reports on social media vaccine misinformation, said. “Instagram has a huge Covid-19 vaccine problem.” Asked about why Bigtree, Tenpenny and Icke were still using Instagram after violating Facebook’s policies, a Facebook spokesperson said that the Instagram accounts had not yet violated Instagram’s policies enough times to be taken down, and that Facebook violations do not count towards the removal of Instagram accounts, even when the same people are operating the accounts. ‘Super-spreaders’ of misinformation While platforms like Pinterest have long implemented strict no-tolerance policies for anti-vaxx propaganda, Facebook has long refused to ban all forms of anti-vaccine activism. The company has argued, as it has done previously with issues like Holocaust denial, that banning false claims which exist elsewhere on the internet is fruitless, and that claims about vaccines should remain on the platform to be debated and factchecked. But as the death toll from coronavirus soared in 2020, and Facebook’s platform became a recruiting and organizing tool for protests against public health measures and even new US domestic terrorist groups, the company began to take more aggressive action to crack down on misinformation linked to real-world destruction. Facebook said in early December that its new policy was born out of concern that Covid vaccine misinformation could lead to “imminent physical harm”, and pledged to remove claims from Facebook and Instagram that experts had identified as false. The company says it is also continuing to limit the reach of groups and pages that spread anti-vaxx misinformation, so that fewer people encounter the content, and touts its efforts to connect users with authoritative information on Covid-19 from health officials, citing that over 600 million people have clicked on pop-ups on Facebook and Instagram to learn more from official sources. Researchers say false claims are still easy to find on Facebook. Researchers say false claims are still easy to find on Facebook. Photograph: Geoff Smith/Alamy Stock Photo But a month after Facebook launched its aggressive new policy, researchers who study anti-vaccine activism say that false claims are still easy to find, and that many posts with misinformation do not have any additional warning labels. In late November, researchers NewGuard, the company that rates the quality of news sites, identified 14 large public English-language Facebook pages as “super-spreaders” of coronavirus vaccine misinformation. Twelve of those Facebook pages were still active in late December, said John Gregory, NewGuard’s deputy editor for health news. He added that the majority of individual vaccine misinformation posts flagged in that November report are also still live on the site, without any factchecking label. A Facebook spokesperson said that all of the pages flagged in the NewsGuard report were already facing consequences for posting material repeatedly flagged by Facebook’s factcheckers. The distribution of their posts into Facebook’s news feed had been dramatically reduced, meaning that fewer people would see them, the spokesperson said, and the pages were no longer being recommended to people who did not already follow them. NewsGuard researchers had noted that Worldtruth.TV, a Facebook page with 1.5 million followers, repeatedly shared false claims about vaccines more than 100 times over the summer, including that they would use “microchips” as part of a global tracking system and would “alter” human DNA. The spread of these kinds of conspiracy theories appears to be having real-world consequences. In Wisconsin, a pharmacist told police he had tried to destroy hundreds of doses of coronavirus vaccine because he believed the shots would mutate people’s DNA, according to court documents released on Monday. Throughout December, even after Facebook’s new policy announcement, Worldtruth.TV continued to post memes and conspiracy theories about coronavirus. Some referred to the vaccine as the “mark of the beast”, a reference to the biblical book of Revelation, and a widespread conspiracy theory that has been promoted most prominently by Kanye West. Several of the posts were explicitly antisemitic. A Facebook spokesperson said that the post referring to the coronavirus vaccine as the “mark of the beast” did not violate company policies, and that it was also not eligible for factchecking. The spokesperson added that Facebook was only removing claims about the coronavirus vaccine that had officially been debunked by health authorities, and that this was an evolving process. NewsGuard’s health editor also flagged continuing coronavirus false claims on GreenMedInfo, a Facebook page with more than 500,000 followers that has repeatedly been linked to health misinformation. In early December, the page was the first to publish a story falsely claiming that “Pfizer’s vaccine had killed two people in the vaccine trial”, said John Gregory, NewGuard’s deputy editor for health news. In fact, those two deaths had not been linked to the vaccine. While posts on both Worldtruth.tv and GreenMedInfo have received relatively little engagement – a sign, Facebook says, that its efforts to limit distribution are working – researchers say it is frustrating to see a continuing tide of falsehoods from the same “bad actors” who have been at work since the pandemic began. “These are not new actors in the misinformation space,” says Gregory. “They didn’t pop up yesterday.” Instead of playing “whack-a-mole” with each new false claim, Gregory says Facebook should take proactive action against accounts based on their history of pushing lies. “You don’t have to wait for them to publish another vaccine claim that will take a few days for a responsible journalist to address, and then slap a factchecking label on it,” he says “You know what these pages are going to do beforehand.”