Facebook鈥檚 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鈥檚 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 鈥� the removal of a major anti-vaccine page in November 2020 鈥� 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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鈥淲e did this work because this is the kind of thing that can inform future efforts,鈥� says Broniatowski.
The lesson to be learned? Facebook鈥檚 method wasn鈥檛 wholly successful. 鈥淔acebook did remove a lot of content and several accounts,鈥� 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鈥檛 significantly different, but the people who avoided bans and blocks began posting more reactionary, aggressive misinformation.
鈥淭he stuff that remained became, on average, more misinformed, not less,鈥� 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. 鈥淚t鈥檚 as if the policy had no effect,鈥� says Broniatowski.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, didn鈥檛 respond to requests to comment. But Broniatowski thinks the way the Facebook platform is designed nullified the company鈥檚 efforts to tackle vaccine misinformation.
鈥淔acebook鈥檚 architecture, and the way it facilitates interactions, really enabled this kind of behaviour,鈥� says Broniatowski. 鈥淯ntil 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.鈥�
Science Advances
