A new study, published this week in Science Advances, argues that Meta’s Covid-19 policies may not have been effective. Though Meta’s decision to remove more content did result in the overall volume of anti-vaccine content on Facebook decreasing, the study found that engagement may have “shifted, rather than decreased” outright.
Their data, they said, indicates that anti-vaccine influencers know how to dodge enforcement at every level of Facebook’s infrastructure, allowing followers to continue to access their content by taking advantage of Facebook’s built-in amplification of content users might want to engage with and of the vast, inter-platform networks of communities, influencers, and tactics that the anti-vaccine movement has built online over time.
Source: A.W. Ohlheiser at Slate
This was disturbing, and not necessarily for reasons the authors intended.
“Online misinformation undermines trust in scientific evidence (1) and medical recommendations (2). It has been linked to harmful offline behaviors including stalled public health efforts (3), civil unrest (4), and mass violence (5).”
Over vaccine misinformation?
“Therefore, policymakers and public officials have put substantial pressure on social media platforms to curtail misinformation spread (8, 9).”
I believe the latter came to light as a result of some recent Freedom of Information releases.
I guess it was Twitter information dumps.