Big Tech’s trying to stop coronavirus misinformation. It’s not enough.
It’s been a year since the World Health Organization first called the coronavirus crisis a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. And online, falsehoods about COVID-19 are as widespread as ever.
Conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccine are shared widely in private Facebook groups. Anti-vax websites are raking in cash from online advertising via Google. Banned disinformation videos are finding their way back online through fringe social networks.
Despite the Big Tech platforms clamping down hard on coronavirus falsehoods and rumors, disinformation tactics and narratives have continued to evolve faster than Big Tech and policymakers can keep up, according to a review of thousands of online posts, videos and messages across Google, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms by the Digital Bridge, POLITICO’s transatlantic tech newsletter.
At the beginning of the crisis, online users spread misinformation about the causes of the pandemic, who was most at risk and bogus cures as people scrambled for any information about a virus they didn’t understand. Yet 12 months into the pandemic, with more than 2.6 million dead, such falsehoods have become more sophisticated, often tapping into well-entrenched online communities that share misinformation across borders and weaponize COVID-19 falsehoods for political gain, and which are now focusing on the vaccine rollout in Western countries.
Far-right groups in Germany and the United States have also used falsehoods about ongoing government-backed lockdowns to attack political leaders, including via narratives around QAnon, a conspiracy theory claiming prominent U.S. government officials are part of a child sex trafficking ring. Anti-vax campaigners across the European Union, the U.S. and beyond also have started to promote horror stories — all debunked — about alleged side effects from injections to warn people against getting them.
Mainstream social networks have responded by banning reams of such content, tweaking their algorithms to limit their reach online and working with national governments to highlight mainstream medical advice about the pandemic. These efforts have forced some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names to take a more active role in moderating online content than they have ever done (or wanted to do) before.
Still, COVID-19 disinformation continues to get through these checks. The ever-evolving digital tactics make it an almost impossible task to police what’s being spread online.
“It’s a very difficult problem to solve,” said Aleksi Knuutila, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute who has tracked the spread of COVID-19 disinformation, particularly on platforms like YouTube. “They are making a lot of noise about the actions they are taking. But if you go looking for questionable activity, you can easily find disinformation content.”
In response, Google, Twitter and Facebook say they have collectively removed millions of pieces of COVID-19 misinformation, banned online users, groups and channels that have promoted these falsehoods, and made it easier for people to find public health information about the pandemic.
“We’re focused on supporting health leaders and public officials in their work to vaccinate billions of people against COVID-19,” Kang-Xing Jin, Facebook’s head of health, said in a blog post last month as the social networking giant announced plans to promote government advice on where people can be vaccinated.
Chasing down falsehoods
Till Eckert is a frontline worker in the war against coronavirus disinformation.
As a fact-checker with Correctiv, a German media organization working with Facebook to combat digital falsehoods, he has spent the last year scouring through viral posts, debunking hundreds of claims that COVID-19 is a myth and that fake cures can keep people safe.
“We’ve turned into a science newsroom now,” he said, adding that his seven-person team had become experts in mundane details like the ins and outs of coronavirus tests. “We went from checking deepfakes and false quotes to doing straight science journalism.”
Since the beginning of the crisis when little, if any, information was known about COVID-19, Eckert said his job had become somewhat less stressful as the same rumors and falsehoods began to circulate over and over again. That allowed his team to quickly jump on trending mistruths before they could take root, although even some of the biggest social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter offered few, if any, data-tracking tools to make the fact-checker’s job easier.
Much of what he sees is homegrown — and has high political stakes. Supporters of the Alternative for Germany, a far-right political party, are promoting falsehoods about how people can keep themselves safe, including the use of bogus cures, and turning it into fodder for campaign purposes. Such tactics are expected to flourish ahead of the country’s federal election in September.
“The conspiracy theory community is growing,” Eckert said. “The far right, disinformation and conspiracy theory scene are influencing each other. Those connections are growing.”
To see how entrenched COVID-19 disinformation has become, POLITICO worked with researchers from King’s College London and the University of Amsterdam to track how videos linked to David Icke, the British conspiracy theorist; Rashid Buttar, an anti-vaxxer; and those related to Plandemic, an online documentary that promoted falsehoods about the public health crisis, were shared online.
These videos had all been blocked from the major platforms amid the yearlong crackdown on COVID-19-related disinformation. But despite these bans, many resurfaced on fringe networks like BitChute, an alternative to YouTube, where they racked up, collectively, hundreds of thousands of views, according to a review by the academics and POLITICO.
The banned videos were also reshared on Facebook via these second-tier platforms by average users, according to data from CrowdTangle, a social media analytics tool owned by Facebook. Combined, they garnered almost 600,000 online engagements such as comments, shares and likes over an 8-month period through December 2020, based on the researchers’ findings. Some of the originally-banned YouTube videos were still present on Facebook months after initially being flagged, the academics discovered. That raised questions about how successful social media companies had been at removing these viral videos from their platforms.
“Facebook acts as a re-platforming platform,” said Emillie de Keulenaar, a doctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam who worked on the analysis. “It gives these videos extra life.”
“We know this is an adversarial space with some people trying to circumvent our enforcement, which is why we’re always working to improve our efforts,” Toby Partlett, a Facebook spokesman, said in a statement. The company removed several of the banned BitChute videos from its platform after POLITICO flagged the material.
Focus on vaccines
Now that vaccination programs are taking root worldwide, disinformation narratives are focused on falsehoods about how these injections could harm people’s health.
POLITICO reviewed thousands of Facebook posts, Twitter messages, YouTube channels and TikTok videos, and quickly discovered scores of posts containing misinformation, as well as posts from prominent anti-vax groups aimed at convincing people not to take the vaccine.
In one, an Instagram account warned people against taking the vaccine because it could lead to people becoming sterile. In another, a Twitter user posted graphic images allegedly of his father who he said had died days after taking the Pfizer vaccine. “Please make people aware of the real truth that is happening all over the world,” he wrote. The post had been shared almost 250 times.
Chine Labbe, the managing editor for Europe at NewsGuard, an analytics firm that tracks misinformation, said anti-vaccine messages from the U.S. were starting to get picked up by similar groups across Europe. Disinformation websites, too, were able to earn money via online advertising by promoting these anti-vaccine falsehoods — with prominent brands, including those associated with the global vaccine rollout like Pfizer and Merck, the pharmaceutical giants, being displayed alongside COVID-19 falsehoods.
In recent weeks, she added, anti-vaccine messages from Robert F. Kennedy Jr — a nephew of the late U.S. President John F. Kennedy — who was banned from Instagram for promoting COVID-19 falsehoods, had been translated into French, German and Italian. Sites in these countries were now churning out a conveyor belt of disinformation linked to Kennedy and other prominent U.S. anti-vaccine campaigners that was picked up widely across social media.
“The speed at which fake narratives travel has only sped up during the crisis,” said Labbe. “The purveyors of fake information have become smarter. They know how to game the system.”
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