Misinformation Cascades: Facebook and the Disinformation Dozen
Since the first vaccines for COVID-19 began to be approved for emergency use very late last year, the conversation around those vaccines has been plagued (no pun intended) by misinformation, misleading framings of scientific facts, and outright lies spread by people looking to increase vaccine hesitancy, whether purely for personal profit or as part of a genuinely-held belief system about vaccines. Regardless of the intent behind these falsehoods, the fact is that conspiracy theories and simple bad science have taken hold worldwide. This is especially true in the United States, where the nature of the pandemic itself became heavily politicized ahead of the 2020 election; the rollout of the vaccines, especially beginning in early 2021, was picked up on immediately as another partisan issue on which Americans could be easily mislead, or outright manipulated. Social media has undeniably played a huge role in this process, as anyone who has been following the latest Facebook scandals can tell you: misinformation spreads incredibly rapidly on these platforms, and many of them are either powerless or just unwilling to try to intervene.
In researching a paper for another class, I came across this article from NPR, “Just 12 People Are Behind Most Vaccine Hoaxes on Social Media, Research Shows”, and the title communicates the gist of the article rather efficiently. A group that one expert calls the “Disinformation Dozen”, including physicians, ‘alternative health entrepreneurs’, and other anti-vaccine activists, is responsible for more than 65% of anti-vax misinformation on social media. These 12 people have a massively disproportionate effect on the opinions held by social media users worldwide, but are particularly successful in the US, where they can play on partisanship in order to establish themselves at the beginning of massive (mis)information cascades. By signaling agreeable heuristic traits to social media users (particularly those on the right side of our national political spectrum), the Disinformation Dozen are able to establish themselves as worth “watching”, and thus able to influence the decision-making of other users. Then, when they introduce hoaxes about the harms of the vaccine, or blame the deaths of celebrities on their vaccinations, people are more likely to decide against getting the vaccine themselves, or even decide to share the misinformation with friends and loved ones. Over time, this small group of people has found themselves at the top of a massive information cascade- one with deeply harmful effects on public health and safety.