How coronavirus ‘changes the game’ for the anti-vaccination movement

Posted May 31, 2020 07:35:53

As humanity waits impatiently for a coronavirus vaccine, a determined minority is exploiting the crisis to push the health debate down a path of alternative truth.

On social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, global networks of influencers share memes, flood comment sections and promote videos aimed at white-anting a drug that does not yet exist.

Some have even claimed the coronavirus pandemic is a manufactured crisis designed to allow a cabal of billionaires, Big Pharma and global bureaucrats led by philanthropist Bill Gates to use a vaccine as a ruse to implant microchips in people.

Not everyone in the anti-vaccine camp buys into those conspiracies, but amid the fear and disruption caused by the pandemic there has been a marked uptick in attention to the topic on Facebook, for example, as seen in this chart below, which uses data from the social analysis tool, CrowdTangle.

Such beliefs can become a “self-sealing world view”, said Dr Sander van der Linden, head of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory at Cambridge University.

“If you look at COVID-19, for example, the conspiracy that this is a secret global plot to justify mandatory global vaccination easily fits into that world view,” he said.

These COVID-19 conspiracies have helped to rally the broad coalition of those opposing mandatory vaccinations, in a shift that threatens to further undermine trust in government and health institutions.

And despite Australia’s high immunisation rates and a first-class health system, we are not immune to the influence of this global phenomenon known as “vaccine hesitancy”.

That embrace was on display on Saturday in rallies around Australia organised by the Australian branch of Millions March Against Mandatory Vaccinations (MMAMV). In Sydney, a crowd of several hundred voiced their concerns about, not just vaccinations, but the dangers of 5G wireless technology, the coronavirus lockdown, China’s role in the global pandemic and general government overreach into people’s lives.

This movement has been boosted by the ubiquity of social-media use which has proven to be a fertile breeding ground for polarising debates — especially when science is in the crosshairs.

When the discredited coronavirus pseudo-documentary, Plandemic, was released online earlier this month, for example, anti-vaccination networks on sites like Facebook and Instagram helped it go viral and trigger a spike in complementary mainstream media interest — as can be seen below in this data provide by the Australian media-monitoring firm Streem.

Australian-run Facebook page 99% unite Main Group “it’s us or them”, which helped promote recent anti-lockdown protests in Melbourne and also dabbles in anti-vaccination material, was cited as being one of the Facebook groups behind its spread.

And other Australians such as influencer Taylor Winterstein and wellness blogger Therese Kerr, mother of model Miranda Kerr, have also helped to promote the Plandemic video on Instagram and other platforms and spread their views on vaccine scepticism to a growing band of followers.

An international network

Anti-vaxxers themselves acknowledge the central role social media has played in finding fame and followers, often connecting anti-vaccination leaders in the United States with those in Australia.

Its importance was recently discussed by prominent anti-vaccine activists in a recent YouTube roundtable, in which some of the movement’s leading voices discussed how they were capitalising on the climate of anxiety fuelled by COVID-19.

In the video, prominent American vaccine sceptic Del Bigtree called the crisis “a dream come true” and an opportunity to “get people to wake up”.

Another participant, Charlene Bollinger (who promotes the anti-vax film The Truth About Cancer) reflected on the instrumental role social media had played in facilitating their networks: “we’ve met a lot of new people just through those social outlets, it’s crazy”.

YouTube has also facilitated ties between anti-vaccination influencers in the United States and the United Kingdom with those in Australia.

Mr Bigtree, the producer and host of YouTube show The Highwire, regularly broadcasts stories, and interviews guests questioning vaccine science. According to YouTube, the channel has at least 171,000 subscribers.

In October, 2019, Mr Bigtree interviewed Taylor Winterstein and her husband, Frank, the former Australian rugby league footballer now playing in France.

Ms Winterstein also promoted Mr Bigtree’s anti-vaccination documentary, Vaxxed, which was directed by prominent anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield, who had his UK medical licence revoked in 2010.

Mr Wakefield was found to have acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in authoring a 1998 study suggesting a possible link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

But even before the onset of the coronavirus crisis, anti-vaccination accounts were testing the major social media platforms’ efforts at minimising the spread of their problematic messages.

Adherents have employed tactics such as “hijacking” existing hashtags to spread their views and are even using code words for vaccines to elude censors, according to research from First Draft, such as “V” or “Vak seen”.

Their activism has also been marketed in new ways, with activists dialling down the embrace of the “anti-vaccination” epithet in favour of terms such as “informed choice”, “medical freedom” and “health choice”.

And their tactics appear to be winning attention. A recent analysis by BuzzFeed News found several Australian anti-vaccination accounts on Facebook and Instagram had dramatically increased their follower count and engagement rate during the pandemic.

According to CrowdTangle, Ms Winterstein, for example, has grown her Instagram follower count by 64 per cent since February.

Nina Jankowicz, disinformation fellow at the Wilson Centre in Washington DC, said she was sceptical of the steps taken by the major social media platforms to control coronavirus misinformation.

In her view, Facebook is incentivising and engendering the spread of such content due to its promotion of Facebook groups as the preferred method of interaction between users.

“They’re doing the bare minimum, as they normally do,” she said. “They reacted slightly more quickly, as this is a crisis of global scale.”

A Facebook spokesperson said the company had “applied warning labels to millions of pieces of misinformation”, but the company acknowledged the way people used its platform evolved every day.

A YouTube spokesperson said the company was “surfacing more authoritative content” for people searching for vaccination-related topics and had begun to reduce recommendations of certain anti-vaccination videos.

“Videos that promote anti-vaccination content have been and remain a violation of our longstanding harmful or dangerous advertising policy,” she said.

Ms Winterstein says government restrictions are part of a plan to “relentlessly drive their fear-based agenda and to condition us to accept what they describe as the ‘new normal’”.

“It is not unreasonable for anyone to be concerned about the obvious overreach of government in imposing draconian restrictions on our basic freedoms in response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” she told the ABC in an email response.

The ABC has also approached Therese Kerr and Mr Bigtree for comment.

How to spread a message

Anti-vaccination groups on social media may be relatively small, but studies suggest they’re able to spread their networks of influence.

Neil Johnson, who heads Complexity and Data Science at George Washington University, mapped nearly 100 million individuals expressing views regarding vaccination on Facebook in 2019.

His study, which was recently published in the science journal Nature, found anti-vaccination clusters — Facebook pages and members who subscribed, shared or interacted with content — took up a central role in the network.

In general, Dr Johnson found anti-vaccination clusters were smaller but far more activist and outward looking. Pro-vaccination pages just weren’t competing.

“I expected to see when we looked at all these communities that in the centre there’d be these strong communities of governments, establishment medical science,” he said.

“But they are kind of off on the periphery and in the core, this huge core was all the minority of anti-vax people.”

The Nature study also found anti-vaccination clusters offered a range of narratives that might appeal to people, from conspiracy theories and alternative health and medicine, to the cause and cure of the COVID-19 virus.

Pro-vaccination content, on the other hand, rarely changed.

“Establishment messaging is like vanilla flavour,” Dr Johnson said.

“[Anti-vaccination messages are] just more attractive. We think of it like more flavours … You can always find one that appeals to you most.”

We don’t know whether exposure to such views converts into actual denial and anti-vaccination sentiment, said Dr van der Linden, who was not involved with the study.

However, it’s clear anti-vaccination groups are entangled in a diverse set of narratives, not only about vaccines but about government conspiracies and other health-related issues.

“They’re reaching more people and have a higher probability to stick with whatever reasons people have to already believe these things,” he said.

“That’s why they’re more dangerous and they have more potential to spread.”

Trying to sow fear and doubt

Amid a pandemic, the furious campaigning of these groups can offer a firm, emotional narrative and community. Mainstream science, on the other hand, can for now only answer with caution and uncertainty.

Australian researchers are beginning to investigate what the country, and particularly parents, might need from government in order to positively accept a coronavirus vaccine.

As part of that, Dr Katie Attwell, senior lecturer at the University of Western Australia, said the team took community attitudes very seriously.

Australia’s high vaccination rates, while they suggest widespread community acceptance, cannot be taken for granted.

“It takes work to keep those attitudes really positive, it’s not something that you can be complacent about,” she said.

It may be the views circulated by the movement’s influencers are gaining more traction than they might in less unusual times, she said, but the right approach for health authorities to take remains elusive.

More research is needed, according to Dr Attwell, to understand the impact of anti-vaccine messaging at this time, and to guide our responses.

“Do we want to be rebutting everything, and therefore also giving oxygen to these views? I’m not sure that that’s the right approach,” she said.

“Do we want to ignore them and hope that they don’t gain traction? That also seems risky.”

While countries like Australia have high vaccination rates for existing immunisations, COVID-19 “changes the game”, according to Dr Johnson.

If and when a vaccine arrives, the messages of health authorities will have to compete with a pervasive online campaign that kicked into gear, trying to sow fear and doubt, well before it even existed.

“[Anti-vaccination groups] are going to have a field day,” Dr Johnson said.

Topics: health, health-policy, vaccines-and-immunity, information-and-communication, internet-culture, social-media, diseases-and-disorders, australia

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