Just seven anti-vax pages generated nearly 20 percent of the top 10,000 vaccination posts in this time period: Natural News, Dr. The distribution is heavy on the top, particularly for the anti-vax position. While there is no dearth of posts related to vaccines, the top 50 Facebook pages ranked by the number of public posts they made about vaccines generated nearly half (46 percent) of the top 10,000 posts for or against vaccinations, as well as 38 percent of the total likes on those posts, from January 2016 to February of this year. At the same time, a small network of “pro-science” pages also experiences viral success countering the anti-vax posts. I found that a relatively small network of pages creates most of the anti-vaccine content that is widely shared. Using the web-monitoring tool CrowdTangle, I analyzed the most popular posts since 2016 that contain the word vaccine. However, while Facebook’s scale might as well be infinite, the actual universe of people arguing about vaccinations is limited and knowable. Sensitive to cries of censorship, Facebook would shy away from intervening. Imagine that hundreds of thousands of people are responsible for the anti-vaccine chatter: To take action against such a network could cause huge ripples in the makeup of the network. If the anti-vaccination posts are widely distributed, then fixing this misinformation problem becomes massively more difficult. Such propaganda appears to be flourishing online, drawing the uninitiated into a tangled web of sources through algorithmic recommendations and human shares.įacebook, for its part, laments the reach of such “health-related misinformation.” But the company can also use the presumed complexity for cover. Look up vaccinations on Facebook, as Representative Adam Schiff did last week, and the results will show a rich supply of anti-vaccination posts, pages, and groups.
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