The efficacy of Facebook’s vaccine misinformation policies and architecture during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Online misinformation promotes distrust in science, undermines public health, and may drive civil unrest. During the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, Facebook—the world’s largest social media company—began to remove vaccine misinformation as a matter of policy. We evaluated the efficacy of these policies using a comparative interrupted time-series design. We found that Facebook removed some antivaccine content, but we did not observe decreases in overall engagement with antivaccine content. Provaccine content was also removed, and antivaccine content became more misinformative, more politically polarized, and more likely to be seen in users’ newsfeeds. We explain these findings as a consequence of Facebook’s system architecture, which provides substantial flexibility to motivated users who wish to disseminate misinformation through multiple channels. Facebook’s architecture may therefore afford antivaccine content producers several means to circumvent the intent of misinformation removal policies.

A population level study on the determinants of COVID-19 vaccination rates at the U.S. county level

“…Instead, it is more likely that we do not yet have data that accurately captures information consumption patterns that influence health-related behaviors. Future work should focus on obtaining data that covers a more representative sample of information shared online, like increasing the number of tweets that can be geolocated or capturing other social media platforms, and employing natural language processing techniques in order to get a deeper understanding of the types of misinformation shared, as in Broniatowski et al’s topic modeling analysis of COVID-19 vaccine information shared on Facebook 38 .…”

Generative artificial intelligence can have a role in combating vaccine hesitancy

“…Traditional public health approaches often struggle to keep pace with the swift dissemination of misinformation. Despite initiatives to counter misinformation through fact checking, such misinformation still retains a substantial influence over people’s beliefs, trust, and decision making processes 56. This underscores the need for innovative strategies that not only counteract misinformation but also delve into the psychological factors that render misinformation more compelling than factual information.…”

Why Misinformation Must Not Be Ignored

“…However, the moment focus shifts away from "the average person" things look far more concerning. For example, consumers who spend large amounts of time on social media can be exposed to increasing amounts of misinformation through algorithmic curation and recommender systems (e.g., Diehl & Lee, 2022); powerful elites can bring hateful and conspiratorial rhetoric into the mainstream (e.g., QAnon-inspired celebrities and politicians; P. Graham & Dugmore, 2022; C. S. Lee et al, 2022; also see Lewandowsky, Jetter, et al, 2020); and fringe groups can attract users who actively seek out misinformation (Broniatowski et al, 2023;Robertson et al, 2023). On several fronts, therefore, arguing that misinformation is of little concern because it represents only a small fraction is an oversimplification.…”