“There is an overarching narrative being shared that the vaccine is not effective,” said Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, recently. As of 8 July, only 67% American adults had received one dose of the vaccine, while 58% were fully vaccinated.įederal officials are increasingly blaming flagging vaccination rates and rising cases in the US on social media platforms that have failed to police misinformation tied to vaccine hesitancy. The administration missed its 4 July target of 70% of Americans receiving at least one Covid-19 vaccine dose. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.īiden’s stark condemnation comes as Covid-19 vaccine uptake is plateauing in the US and new cases are again on the rise. Taylor Greene – who is not named in the top 12 disinformation spreaders but is often flagged for sharing falsehoods about Covid and other issues – was temporarily suspended from Twitter on Monday. Another leading post on Facebook about the Covid-19 vaccines last week was a deeply inaccurate anti-vaccine rant from the rightwing Candace Owens, according to FWIW, a newsletter which tracks digital ad spends.Īnd the number one Facebook post in the entire country about the vaccine on Friday was Marjorie Taylor Greene calling removal of Covid disinformation “communism”, according to Facebook’s in-house analysis tool Crowdtangle. She added it is difficult to gauge the scope of the issue when Facebook does not share figures.Īccording to the social media watchdog Accountable Tech, 11 out of the top 15 vaccine related-posts on Facebook last week contained disinformation or were anti-vaccine. “Facebook needs a much better mechanism to stop the spread of false information about the vaccine, and they need to make sure they’re doing that across languages,” said Jessica González, the co-CEO at Free Press, a media equity group. One prevailing, baseless conspiracy theory is that the vaccine implants users with a tracking microchip.Įxperts say these posts are particularly prevalent on Spanish-language Facebook – an area of the platform they say Facebook does not devote enough resources to moderating. Many posts falsely imply that the vaccine is not safe, not effective, or not worth getting despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Other research has also shown the scale of the problem remains vast. He has also used the platform to promote his anti-vaccination book The Truth About Covid-19. The alternative medicine doctor Joseph Mercola also remains on Facebook, where he has made a number of vaccine-skeptical posts in recent weeks that were reshared hundreds of times by his 1.7 million followers. For instance, the anti-vaccine figurehead Robert F Kennedy Jr still has an account on Facebook, despite being banned from Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Misinformation experts have condemned platforms for taking down some of the most egregious accounts, but not others. They have lost 41% of their followers – 5.8 million – but still have 8.4 million followers total and 62 active accounts. In the months since the study was released, the CCDH confirmed social platforms have taken action against members of the “dozen”, removing 35 accounts across social media. A Facebook spokesman said the company permanently bans pages, groups, and accounts that “repeatedly break our rules on Covid misinformation”, including “more than a dozen pages, groups, and accounts from these individuals”. That report from March identified the 12 “superspreader” accounts.
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