As the pandemic wears on, social media isn’t getting much healthier. A succession of dodgy cures, unsubstantiated theories, and direct anti-vaccination lies continues to spread in Facebook groups, YouTube videos, Instagram comments, TikTok hashtags, and tweets. Multiple members of Congress were suspended from Twitter or YouTube for peddling misinformation around the time President Joe Biden spoke out against social media platforms’ penchant for spreading false information.
“They’re killing people,” Biden said last month, answering a reporter’s question about the role of “platforms like Facebook” in the spread of Covid-related misinformation. In response, Facebook cited a study it conducted with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University that found increases in “vaccine acceptance” among its users over the course of 2021. (The company has also criticized the president for focusing on what it’s called a relative few bad actors, such as the prominent anti-vaxxer influencers the White House has dubbed the Disinformation Dozen.) Biden took a less directly confrontational tack a few days later.
Yet despite a new level of candor, the debate around anti-vaccine misinformation hasn’t advanced much since the first pandemic lockdowns. Often the issue is framed as one of moderation—that if social networks just enforced their own rules, they’d ban the biggest purveyors of falsehoods and things would be fine. “Those community standards are there for a reason,” says Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate. The volume of moderation is also the chief metric cited by the internet companies themselves. In its response to Biden’s “killing people” comment in July, Facebook said it had removed more than 18 million examples of Covid-19 misinformation, and labeled and buried more than 167 million pieces of pandemic-related content. In an Aug. 25 blog post, YouTube said it had removed at least 1 million videos related to “dangerous coronavirus information.”
Of course, that’s not a lot for a service with billions of users. “I think anytime we’re talking about at the moderation level, we’re failing,” says Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters for America. “Too marginal to matter.” Media Matters recently documented how Facebook users engaged more than 90 million times with a single video taken at an Indiana school board meeting questioning the effectiveness of vaccines and masks. At the time this article was published, several copies of the video Carusone’s team tracked were accessible on both Facebook and YouTube. And yes, they’re far from the only such videos on each service.
While reducing the overall supply of misinformation on social networks has value, it’s more important that the sites stop artificially stoking demand. That means drastically overhauling their highly effective recommendation engines to punish purveyors of misinformation for lying, instead of rewarding them for their skill at getting and holding viewers’ attention. Too late, this is becoming received wisdom among governments as well as watchdogs. “The rapid spread of misinformation online is potentially fuelled by the algorithms that underpin social media platforms,” the U.K.’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology said in a post on its website. The European Union is weighing proposals that would require social media companies to disclose more about how these algorithms work.
The big platforms again say they embrace algorithmically limiting the reach of bad information, but the learning curve has been steep. Anti-vaxxers are just one of several fringe communities on the internet that have become more than adept at playing whack-a-mole. NBC News recently reported how a selection of anti-vaxxer groups on Facebook had avoided the ax by renaming themselves “Dance Parties.” To catch up, let alone keep up, social platforms would need to invest significantly in applying lessons from smart, ground-level moderators, information theorists, cryptographers, and former employees who’ve spoken up about the companies’ failures in this area.
U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) have introduced a bill that would suspend Section 230—the long-standing legal shield for websites that host other people’s conversations—for social networks found to be boosting anti-vaxxer conspiracies. “For far too long, online platforms have not done enough to protect the health of Americans,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “This legislation will hold online platforms accountable for the spread of health-related misinformation.”
Advocates of these reforms tend to get less comfortable when it comes to conservative outlets that more closely resemble the traditional free press, such as Fox News and talk radio. Clips from these sources questioning or denying the utility of Covid vaccines continue to find wide audiences on social networks. Still, it’s always wise to avoid giving governments broad power to censor the press, says Philip Mai, co-director of the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University in Toronto. “If you look at any misinformation laws that have been passed in the last four years, eventually they are used by the party in power to keep themselves in power and to lock up dissidents,” he says.
Reducing incentives to promote vaccine skepticism, Mai says, means following the money beyond social networks. “For many of these people, it’s a grift,” he says. “They don’t care what they’re selling as long as the paycheck is rolling in.” E-commerce sites could be a good place to start. Bloomberg Businessweek easily found anti-vaxxer products such as books, shirts, and even masks on Amazon.com, Etsy, and a handful of crowdfunding sites. Apple Inc. removed Unjected, a dating app for anti-vaxxers, from its App Store last month, but the app remains on the Android equivalent, Google Play, where its banner image promotes unsubstantiated claims about Covid vaccines.
No one of these strategies is a panacea, especially at this point. They all need to be tried in combination, in good faith, and in earnest. Before the holiday season and winter return, likely bringing another surge of both Covid cases and the inevitable wave of misinformation that now comes alongside them, we still have a chance to change the story—to make our social networks healthier, and ourselves along with them.
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August 30, 2021 at 05:00PM
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How to Fix Covid Vaccine Misinformation on Facebook (FB), Social Media - Bloomberg
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