In February 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) had warned about an anticipated “infodemic” of COVID-19 misinformation. Unsurprisingly, the “infodemic” has become a reality just three months later. Mundane misinformation, outlandish conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine theories about COVID-19 are spreading as fast as, or faster than, SARS-CoV-2 itself.
They first sprang up in the form of speculations about the manmade origins of SARS-CoV-2 that have been largely debunked but still not laid to rest, and have quickly become interwoven with other pre-existing conspiracy theory themes related to 5G networks and vaccines.
Nothing is more serious than misinformation related to vaccine. Worryingly, groups that spread vaccine misinformation on social media have more impact than government health agencies and other expert organizations on undecided people, a new study finds.
For the study, investigators developed an innovative tool to map vaccine conversations among 100 million Facebook users during the height of the 2019 measles outbreak.
“There is a new world war online surrounding trust in health expertise and science, particularly with misinformation about COVID-19, but also distrust in big pharmaceuticals and governments,” said lead author Neil Johnson, a professor who heads a new initiative in Complexity and Data Science at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “Nobody knew what the field of battle looked like, though, so we set to find out.”
While vaccine supporters outnumber users with anti-vaccine views on Facebook, the platform has nearly three times as many anti-vaccination communities, according to the study. That makes it far more likely that their views will reach people who are undecided.
In the second study, Monique Luisi, PhD, assistant professor of strategic communication at the University of Missouri, analyzed 6,506 HPV vaccine Facebook posts that appeared in the first decade following Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. She published her findings yesterday in Vaccine.
She found that Facebook posts about the vaccine were mostly negative, focusing on barriers (physical or psychological) to vaccination, with negative posts encouraging more negative posts. Barriers to HPV vaccination appeared in 47.1% of posts, compared with benefits in only 19.8%.
“The post with the most engagement (11,000 reactions, 6,100 comments, and 329,000 shares displayed) was anti-HPV vaccine, and negative posts received significantly greater engagement,” Luisi wrote. “Over time, negative tone and barriers had a greater presence.”
Last year, the United States reported the greatest number of measles cases since 1992. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 1,282 individual cases of measles in 31 states in 2019, and the majority were among people who were not vaccinated against measles. It was yet another example of how the proliferation of anti-vaccine messaging has put public health at risk, and the COVID-19 pandemic is only intensifying the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, the spread of misinformation has gotten even worse. “We didn’t stop the day we submitted this paper,” said Johnson. “We’ve been monitoring every day, every minute, the conversations and what you see in these Facebook pages, in these clusters, these communities. It’s gone into hyper drive since COVID-19.”