Pressure Mounts On Google And Facebook To Stop Anti-Vax Conspiracy Theories
As a measles outburst carries on to spread in state of Washington, Facebook is “exploring extra measures” to battle false anti-vaccine material on the platform, media claimed.
The news follows on the heels of disparagement from Representative Adam Schiff, who sent Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO) a letter about vaccine fake data on Instagram and Facebook. In the letter, Schiff voiced worries that both Instagram and Facebook serve up fear-mongering & misleading content related to vaccines, which have been displayed to be effective, safe, and essential for public health. Schiff also sent an analogous letter to Google’s Sundar Pichai related to vaccine fake data on YouTube.
In the letters, Schiff claimed that the misinformation on these websites might make parents overlook legitimate medical recommendation to vaccinate their kids. “Repetition of data, even if fake, can frequently be mistaken for correctness,” he wrote. He referenced latest reporting by a journalist, who found that both YouTube and Facebook are full of inaccurate & fear-mongering anti-vaccine propaganda.
On a related note, Russian trolls and social media bots spread false information and promoted discord about vaccines on Twitter, a research discovered. Employing tactics akin to those at work in the presidential election of United States in 2016, these Twitter accounts made an entry into vaccine debates months prior to election season was in progress.
Scientists from the Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University in the U.S. studied a number of tweets posted from July 2014 to September 2017. “The gigantic majority of people in the U.S. believe vaccines are effective and safe, but looking at Twitter offers the idea that there is a lot of dispute. It turns out that most of the anti-vaccine posts arrive from accounts whose origin is uncertain,” claimed an assistant professor at George Washington University, David Broniatowski, to the media in an interview.
