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Facebook Becomes 'A Haven For the Anti-Vaccination Movement' (siliconvalley.com)
"As a disturbing number of measles outbreaks crop up around the United States, Facebook is facing challenges combating widespread misinformation about vaccinations on its platform," reported the Washington Post Wednesday, saying Facebook "has become a haven for the anti-vaccination movement" and that "the rise of 'anti-vaxx' Facebook groups is overlapping with a resurgence of measles" in the U.S.
Facebook has publicly declared that fighting misinformation is one of its top priorities. But when it comes to policing misleading content about vaccinations, the site faces a thorny challenge. The bulk of anti-vaccination content doesn't violate Facebook's community guidelines for inciting "real-world harm," according to a spokesperson, and the site's algorithms often promote unscientific pages or posts about the issue...
Wendy Sue Swanson, a pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital and spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics, recently met with Facebook strategists about dealing with public health issues, including misinformation about vaccines, on the platform... "Facebook isn't responsible for changing quacks but they do have an opportunity to change the way information is served up." But Facebook's algorithms often promote anti-vaccination content over widely accepted, scientifically backed posts or pages about vaccinations. A recent investigation from the Guardian found that Facebook search results regarding vaccines were "dominated by anti-vaccination propaganda...." Facebook also accepted advertising revenue from Vax Truther, Anti-Vaxxer, Vaccines Revealed and Michigan for Vaccine Choice, among others, according to another investigation from the Guardian [which found Facebook even offers the ability to target 900,000 users that Facebook has helpfully identified as interested in "vaccine controversies."]
Last month YouTube promised to stop recommending videos that "could misinform users in harmful ways," and later told the Guardian that that would include anti-vaccine videos. The Guardian also noted this week that one anti-vaccination group on Facebook has over 150,000 members. But Facebook told the Post Wednesday that by not deleting the pseudoscience, they're actually giving their users an opportunity to speak up on their own and share factual counter-arguments themselves.
By Thursday Facebook added that it was "exploring" additional steps, including "reducing or removing this type of content from recommendations, including 'Groups You Should Join,' and demoting it in search results, while also ensuring that higher quality and more authoritative information is available."
Wendy Sue Swanson, a pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital and spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics, recently met with Facebook strategists about dealing with public health issues, including misinformation about vaccines, on the platform... "Facebook isn't responsible for changing quacks but they do have an opportunity to change the way information is served up." But Facebook's algorithms often promote anti-vaccination content over widely accepted, scientifically backed posts or pages about vaccinations. A recent investigation from the Guardian found that Facebook search results regarding vaccines were "dominated by anti-vaccination propaganda...." Facebook also accepted advertising revenue from Vax Truther, Anti-Vaxxer, Vaccines Revealed and Michigan for Vaccine Choice, among others, according to another investigation from the Guardian [which found Facebook even offers the ability to target 900,000 users that Facebook has helpfully identified as interested in "vaccine controversies."]
Last month YouTube promised to stop recommending videos that "could misinform users in harmful ways," and later told the Guardian that that would include anti-vaccine videos. The Guardian also noted this week that one anti-vaccination group on Facebook has over 150,000 members. But Facebook told the Post Wednesday that by not deleting the pseudoscience, they're actually giving their users an opportunity to speak up on their own and share factual counter-arguments themselves.
By Thursday Facebook added that it was "exploring" additional steps, including "reducing or removing this type of content from recommendations, including 'Groups You Should Join,' and demoting it in search results, while also ensuring that higher quality and more authoritative information is available."
Letting these tards on the internet was a horrible, horrible mistake. Non-tech people weren't ready for the internet.
They may never be ready.
be doing something to identify and remove "fake news"?
Or are they becoming so desperate for new members they'll accept a group who advocates something stupider than flat earthers?
Utter bullshit. No degree of "border controls" (except "shoot them all, including citizens returning from vacation abroad, from a large distance and incinerate the bodies immediately") will have any effect here. Learn at least the basics of how things work before spouting utter nonsense.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
... social media site found to contain subdivided groups of people with similar interests, sharing opinions within their own echo chambers.
Haha actually anti vaxxers are left wingers who don't watch Faux News
The anti-vax movement is not politically polarized. Instead, it attracts kooks from both the right and left. It is associated with political extremism regardless of direction. Left-wingnuts see vaccines as a corporate conspiracy. Right-wingnuts see vaccines as a government conspiracy. Moderates on both the left and right vaccinate their kids.
I fully support people not getting a vaccine when they have genuine medical evidence that they are especially vulnerable to side effects. In fact, that is why it is so important to have as many people as possible to be vaccinated -- so that we can protect those who cannot afford to take the risk.
I would take the risk of measles over becoming parapelegic any day of the week.
If you actually had a real risk, that may be correct. But if it is just something you made up to push blame of your mother's hidden but already existing MS on someone, so you can have a fairy tale that you can protect yourself, well, I cannot persuade the purposefully stupid.
Furthermore I would also point out that if you have some extreme autoimmune risk, contracting the real flu is inherently dangerous to you, even if the vaccine might be more dangerous. So, in this scenario, one should think real hard about whether lots of people avoiding vaccines on weakly thought out reasons is a good policy -- since those people not getting vaccinated might literally kill you.
Where are the stats to back this up? You can't just claim an incendiary partisan point like that without citing sources.
It is hard to imagine, impossible actually, this conversation happening 50 years ago. Circa 1950-1970, parents knew all too well the terror of polio from their childhood years, and the non-trivial, often major risks of measles and rubella, tetanus and diphtheria. If a few unfortunate people had severe side effects of a vaccine, it was of course very sad for that person or family, but a handful of adverse reactions was accepted and respected to protect tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of other lives.
It is easy to dismiss the non-vaxers as just kooks and idiots, as they probably are, but today, without large epidemics of those diseases to keep everyone just a little terrified, the issue becomes out-of-sight-out-of-mind. It is easy then for the herd to forget why we vaccinate, and what the price is for failing to do so. Of course, we have to decide if we castigate and chastise versus dismiss and forgive, those anti-vaxers who place their fear of a one-in-a-million complication above a sense of communal responsibility, participation, and shared risk.
A situation like this is ultimately self-correcting over a cycle of maybe 50 to a 100 years. If too many people fail to vaccinate for whatever reason, and epidemics of deadly disease flareup, then eventually enough people will get scared enough to make enough noise for government to step in or act responsibly as the voice of the overly vocal anti-vaxers die down or start singing the opposite tune. It will just take one loud mouthed or well connected anti-vaxer to have their precious Johnny or Janey die from measles or tetanus or be crippled by polio to start singing a different tune. Unfortunately, public perception and stupidity or governmental cowardice and ineptitude create propagation delays and phase lags in the response to such large social issues, first too slow to act, then too far of an overshoot, such that an even keel steady-as-she goes balance cannot be maintained. Sadly, un-moderated un-referreed adult-free Lord-of-the Flies platforms like Facebook make it all too easy for the kooks to have too much influence.
There is though a simple and elegant solution. If you choose to eschew the common good and fail to participate in the general welfare, so be it. But, if you make your own rules, you must live by those rules. Don't want to vaccinate - fine. But, if your poor Johnny and Janey gets sick with the measles or any such preventable disease, tough, no insurance for you. It's like the Little Red Hen. If you don't want to participate in making the bread, you don't get to eat the bread. Want to save poor little Johnny's life, or spend years rehabilitating him for paralysis or hearing loss or months on a ventilator? Well, sad for the poor kid, but the parents got what they bargained for, and they have to pay for it all themselves, no dipping into the societal funds available to help those who acted responsibly in the interests of the greater good. No vaccination, no problem, but if you get sick from that, No insurance for you - so sayeth Yev Kassem.
This is the result of freedom of speech. It's a Good Thing. Sure, go ahead and make laws that outlaw incitement to illegal activities, but you'd better not make a law against telling people what to believe.
If you think that having people be unvaccinated is such a danger to public health, then go ahead and make vaccination a legal requirement. Banning people from even advocating against vaccination is a more extreme step than that.
Yes, I get it: we're not talking about all free speech here, only speech via Facebook. They can restrict speech much more than can the government via corporate policies. But I'm sure they don't want to moderate postings more than they have to, just for cost reasons, and do you really want some opaque and unaccountable Facebook system deciding what we're allowed to read?
The solution is for people to learn how to distinguish good reporting from propaganda. Not everyone's going to be able to do this, or even want to, but having some percentage of people fall for lies is better than trying to filter what everyone reads.
Hey, wanna blast from the past regarding paralysis? Google âoeiron lungâ, the machine used to keep people breathing after being paralyzed by polio, before vaccines pretty much wiped it out. Ive had bad effects after getting vaccines, and I wouldnt blame someone with the same for quietly opting out, but people doing public outreach telling others not to take them and raising their own chance of infection are IDIOTS.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
No. Conspiracy theories thrive because people are emotional and refuse to believe things that go against their interests, and want a justification of why things aren't the way they want. The more complex the explanation is, the more people believe it's a conspiracy.
Take for example Nikola Tesla. There is, especially in Latin America, a huge amount of people who believe in free energy (curiously they call it "energias libres" meaning free as in free speech, when they mean "energias gratis" meaning free as in free beer). For these people, Nikola Tesla was a messiah. He was the person who INVENTED electricity. Then he was stopped by the most evil person in history: Thomas Edison, who only wanted money and didn't know wany science. And because of this, we are now forced to pay for electricity. If only Tesla could have developed his "energy tower", we'd have free electricity for all mankind. But Tesla died, and thus, we can't have free power anymore. There is no other person who could develop this. We're doomed now. Damn Edison!
That's what they honestly believe. It's all a conspiracy of corporations protected by governments (especially the US government), who want to force us to pay for something Tesla demonstrated is free. This is the conspiracy theory and it comes from people who just want to blame high energy costs to other factors, and not the fact that they mostly live in poor countries with low salaries.
The same goes for people who believe in "the car that runs on water and the patent was bought by Big Oil and the inventor killed".
Youtube is full of "free energy" videos of people turning lightbulbs on in thin air and have millions of views and thousands of comments claiming it's not fake, it's real, and thus, this proves everything Tesla said was right. But they're not Tesla, so they can't make it large scale.
There is always the "messiah complex" thing with conspiracy theorists. That things are "invented" by lone wolfes at their houses, and not in university or corporate labs (duh, obviously if they did that, corporations would steal their ideas).
Moon landing conspiracy theorists come up with the wildest explanations of why the moon landing is fake. One of them, I remember, was from a poor country and said "wow, we barely could make TV work at a few kilometers and it was really difficult, expensive, and in black and white, and this was in 1978, but the americans not only sent a rocket to the moon but also transmitted from the moon IN COLOR? It's obviously fake". This person wasn't even aware that "americans" had color TV in 1953, 16 years before people went to the moon. Or that americans sent TV signals to satellites in space in 1962. And those satellites were used to broadcast the moon landing live across the world. No. He lived in a poor country, with poor infrastructure, and he had a poor experience. So it must have been the same way for everyone everywhere.
In short, it's not about "official narrative", it's about people refusing to believe in the evidence presented, because they deeply believe in something.
Oh and the USA being in the middle of it is enough to prove the conspiracy. Russia though, is cool. Russia is our friend. Putin is a nice person but he's demonized by the USA. Venezuela is broke because the USA's sanctions (the country has been broke for years even though the US had no sanctions against them until a less than month ago, and the US is the biggest money supplier, paying Venezuela with actual money, while Russia is getting free oil from interests from loans given by Russia being paid with raw oil, at a rate they "restructure" the debt every few years and keep a continuous supply of free oil)