Today, online communities foment fears by offering digital spaces for mis- and disinformation to flourish in largely echo chambers where anti-vaccination activists, unrestrained by editorial gatekeepers, have been able to broadcast their claims, unchecked. While there has since been plenty of research debunking the claim and Wakefield has had his medical credentials pulled, trepidation about vaccination persists. Some 200 years later, anti-vaccination fears coalesced in the late 1990s after Andrew Wakefield published a now-retracted, notorious study in The Lancet that fraudulently connected the MMR jab to autism. Its derivation from cowpox captured people’s imagination: Wild imagery circulated in pamphlets of inoculated women growing horns and birthing calves, for example. Shortly after Edward Jenner created the vaccine in 1796 to protect people against smallpox, opposition to this new life-saving technology proliferated. Indeed, vaccine misinformation can be traced back to when vaccines were first developed, DiResta explained. Public health organizations and social media platforms have been trying to tackle the problem of anti-vaccine activism and hesitancy long before the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, posts in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese – the two most spoken languages in the United States after English – were also analyzed by language specialists.Ī long history of anti-vax disinformation Since the spring of 2020, the Virality Project has investigated some 900 incidents across major social media platforms in the U.S., including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and TikTok, as well as newer online spaces such as Gab, Parler, Telegram and Gettr. Tackling real-time disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines The team also wanted to better understand what makes anti-vaccination rhetoric, which has existed as long as vaccines themselves, distinct from other forms of mis- and disinformation, which DiResta started tracking when she co-founded Vaccinate California in 2015, a parent advocacy group working to improve public health in California by raising vaccination rates. election to the COVID-19 crisis that was unfolding all around them. When mis- and information about vaccination started going viral at the start of the coronavirus pandemic – long before a vaccine against COVID-19 had even been developed or approved – the team reassembled (and added new members NYU Tandon and the National Conference on Citizenship) to apply what they learned during the 2020 U.S. election to address electoral-related mis- and disinformation. The Virality Project grew out of prior research DiResta was involved with at SIO and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (UW), as well as Graphika, a social network analysis firm, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab during the 2020 U.S. where they will share highlights of the report.
The research team behind Memes, Magnets and Microchips will be holding a webinar on Thursday, Feb. “Myths, rumors and disinformation contribute to vaccine hesitancy, and thinking about our information environment is part of understanding the public health quandary that we find ourselves in.”
“There are very real-world impacts to vaccine hesitancy at this moment in time,” said DiResta, the technical research manager at SIO. Their collaboration has culminated in a new report, Memes, Magnets and Microchips: Narrative dynamics around COVID-19 vaccines, that offers specific recommendations for how public health officials, social media platforms and other academic institutions can counter and curb the spread of false or misleading information that has a potential negative impact on individual or public health. Throughout 2021 and into the present, DiResta’s team at the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) has been working hard to detect and disrupt mis- and disinformation related to the COVID-19 vaccines in real-time as part of her work leading the Virality Project, a multi-year effort between SIO and five other research groups. (Image credit: Andrew Brodhead)Īs the pandemic continues to be an ongoing health emergency with new variants rapidly spreading, it is increasingly urgent that accurate vaccine-related information be accessible and readily available to the public, said Stanford scholar and leading expert on mis- and disinformation, Renée DiResta.
SPREADING VACCINE MISINFORMATION UNDERMINE EFFORTS IMMUNIZE HOW TO
Stanford scholar Renée DiResta is the author of a new report looking how to stop the online spread of mis- and disinformation related to the COVID-19 vaccine.
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