Facebook’s attempts to remove misinformation about covid-19 vaccines from its platform instead made anti-vaccine content more extreme, say researchers.
at the George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues monitored engagement with more than 200,000 posts on Facebook pages and groups between 15 November 2019 and 28 February 2022. Within that period, Facebook made three major announcements, which together advanced the platform’s approach to clamping down on content that shared incorrect information about vaccinations.
The researchers analysed the number of posts before and after the first of those announcements – the removal of a major anti-vaccine page in November 2020 – as well as the level of engagement with those posts, measured by counting the shares, comments, likes and other reactions to the content.
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“We did this work because this is the kind of thing that can inform future efforts,” says Broniatowski.
The lesson to be learned? Facebook’s method wasn’t wholly successful. “Facebook did remove a lot of content and several accounts,” says Broniatowksi. The overall volume of content on anti-vaccine pages decreased to 32 per cent of what was happening before the change, and the amount on pro-vaccine pages wasn’t significantly different, but the people who avoided bans and blocks began posting more reactionary, aggressive misinformation.
“The stuff that remained became, on average, more misinformed, not less,” he says. They included more links to websites known to be purveyors of misinformation, as well as a higher proportion of topics known to be common areas of misinformation.
There was also more engagement with individual posts: anti-vaccine content saw a 33 per cent higher level of engagement than would have been expected based on trends before the policy change.
The researchers concluded that removing reams of content did little to change the overall level of engagement on vaccine disinformation on the platform. “It’s as if the policy had no effect,” says Broniatowski.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, didn’t respond to requests to comment. But Broniatowski thinks the way the Facebook platform is designed nullified the company’s efforts to tackle vaccine misinformation.
“Facebook’s architecture, and the way it facilitates interactions, really enabled this kind of behaviour,” says Broniatowski. “Until that architectural element is addressed, one-off changes to algorithms or removing content is simply going against the design purpose of the platform, which is to build communities around topics of common interest.”
Science Advances
