With fake news, anti-vax discourse spreads in social media

Fake news of any kind is of great concern globally, but especially important in terms of health care and vaccination at a time of the COVID-19 pandemic and a decline in uptake for children’s and HPV vaccines.

According to a posting on Brazil’s Fiocruz website by the Institute’s Cristine Albuquerque, the plots are astonishing. In the USA, a 14-year-old girl – still a virgin, the message highlights – supposedly became pregnant after having her flu shot.

In another version of the story, the girls are Mexican and are between 11 and 17 years old. In this case, the culprit of the pregnancies is the HPV vaccine. With variations, false narratives such as these, absolutely devoid of scientific evidence, disseminate through social networks, supporting the anti-vax movement. However, a study that investigated posts on vaccines with highest number of interactions in social media shows the predominance of voices favorable to immunization.

The results show that there is a mostly pro-vaccination disposition (87.6%) and a marked interest in subjects related to health, scientific development, and health policies. Fake news represented 13.5% of the links with higher levels of interaction, which, according to the researchers, is a worrying fact when it comes to disinformation regarding vaccines.

‘Extremely serious problem’

“Fake news in health are currently an extremely serious problem, as they represent a disservice to the population,” says Luisa Massarini, a researcher at the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz (COC/Fiocruz) and one of the authors of the study. “We must keep an eye on this type of content, because social media can be used to reverberate the voices of anti-vax movements”, she warns.

Published in August in the Reports of Public Health, the results were obtained from the analysis of the links that were shared, “liked” and commented the most on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit, in the interval of one year starting in May 2018. Of the one hundred pages identified through a digital monitoring tool (BuzzSumo), 11 were offline when the analysis was made, which reduced the valid sample to 89 links.  

Although data indicate a lower prevalence of fake news in posts with higher interaction over the period under analysis, Ms Massarini warns that they may be present in a more widespread manner in social media, and are therefore worthy of attention. In addition, she adds, the problem of fake news seems to have become more intense with the COVID-19 pandemic, a phenomenon also observed in other ongoing studies.