Facebook Probe Into Vaccine Doubters
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
(Worthy News) – Social media giant Facebook is conducting an extensive behind-the-scenes study of doubts by U.S. users about vaccines as part of efforts to crack down on what it views as dangerous ideas, Worthy News monitored.
Coronavirus-related “misinformation” has flooded the company’s platforms, including “false narratives about COVID-19 being less deadly than the flu,” The Washington Post newspaper reported.
Facebook also noted, “false” allegations that the pandemic is “somehow associated with a population-control plot by philanthropist Bill Gates and that vaccines are associated with the Antichrist.”
In response, Facebook wants “to probe and teach software to identify the medical attitudes of millions of Americans,” The Washington Post reported.
Facebook, which owns WhatsApp messenger and social networking service Instagram, collects extensive data on its more than 3.3 billion users worldwide. It also has a broad reach onto those users’ devices.
The Washington Post quoted health experts as saying that the company is in a unique position to “examine attitudes toward vaccines, testing and other behaviors, and push information to people.”
Facebook has already banned what it views as outright “false” and “misleading” statements about coronavirus vaccines since December.
However, “a huge realm of expression about vaccines sits in a gray area. One example could be commented by someone expressing concern about side effects that are more severe than expected,” The Washington Post reported.
“Those comments could be both important for fostering meaningful conversation and potentially bubbling up unknown information to health authorities. But at the same time, they may contribute to vaccine hesitancy by playing upon people’s fears.”
Facebook reportedly explored how to address that tension by studying anti-vaccine comments tagged “VH” by the company’s software algorithms, as well as the nature of the communities that spread them.
Its early findings suggested that a large amount of content that doesn’t break the rules may be “causing harm in certain communities,” where it has an “echo chamber” effect.
The company’s data scientists divided the company’s U.S. users, groups, and pages into 638 population segments to explore which types of groups hold vaccine-hesitant beliefs.
The document didn’t identify how Facebook defined a segment or grouped communities but reportedly noted that the segments could be at least 3 million people.
Just 10 out of the 638 population segments contained 50 percent of all vaccine hesitancy content on the platform. And in the population segment with the most vaccine hesitancy, just 111 users contributed half of all vaccine-hesitant content, documents showed.
Facebook suggested that it could use the findings to inform discussions of its policies to address alleged inappropriate content or direct more authoritative information to the specific groups. “The company is still developing its solution,” spokeswoman Dani Lever said in published comments.
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