Vaccine wars: Social media battle outbreak of bogus claims | Health24com
-related misinformation they have long helped spread. So far, their efforts at quarantine are falling short.
Facebook, meanwhile, said in March it will no longer recommend groups and pages that spread hoaxes about vaccines - and that it will reject ads that do this. This appears to have filtered out some of the most blatant sources of vaccine misinformation, such as the website Naturalnews.com, which had regularly posted anti-vaccine propaganda and showed up high in Facebook searches about the topic.
"There has been hesitancy about vaccines as long as vaccines have existed," said Jeanine Guidry, professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies social media and vaccines. Such sentiment, dating back to the 1700s, was once confined to towns and local communities. Online, it dates back long before Facebook and Twitter. A 2002 study on Google search results found that 43% of the sites surfaced after searches for"vaccination" and"immunization" were anti-vax.
"It's completely understandable why parents would seek out this stuff," he said. The problem is, they spend a lot more online than they do in a doctor's office where they are much more likely to receive accurate information.- kicked off by a now disproven study from 1998 - didn't start on social networks but it has certainly spread there.
Misinformation on Facebook is more difficult to study since a lot of it isn't public, especially when people post in hidden or secret groups - where much of the hoaxes and false claims are spread. In such groups, like-minded people congregate to share their views and receive support from their peers. Facebook's new policies mean fewer people will find those groups, but the company is not going so far as banning them altogether.
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