Article: From Facebook to YouTube: The Potential Exposure to COVID-19 Anti-Vaccine Videos on Social Media
Let’s be honest, COVID-19 was a bit of a bummer for everyone. The seemingly never-ending lockdowns had us turning to our screens for entertainment – spending countless hours scrolling through funny dog videos and less-than-stellar baking endeavours. But our usual feeds were littered with a growing presence of individuals and groups who held strong and, in some cases, insistent views on vaccinations. As someone with an auto-immune disease, all the unknowns and misinformation being broadcasted everywhere, there were no escapes from the nerve-wracking commentary on what we considered life-or-death decisions.
Now that we are in a post-pandemic phase, it is interesting to explore how prominent social media platforms created an environment to rapidly spread information around the world to a significant portion of the population. From the coverage of misinformation without scientific backing and the promotion of anti-vaccine conspiracies on social media, behaviours in the public were impacted in the ‘real world’ with vaccine reluctance and ill-informed protests being the result.
On Facebook, studies found that around 41% to 88% of misinformation about COVID-19 remained available on their platform, despite the interventions the company introduced in late 2020 (Gruzd et al., 2023, p. 4, as cited in Avaaz, 2020 and Szeto et al., 2021). Further investigation of 56 Facebook entities showed 37 supported anti-vaccine opinions and merely 8 entities shared pro-vaccine information. Thankfully a review of 98 anti-vaccine posts, only 33 remained available on the platform (Gruzd et al., 2023, p. 10).
Since YouTube’s beginnings in 2005, anti-vaccination ideology has taken advantage of the free streaming service and exponential yearly audience growth. However, during COVID-19 anti-vax was kicked into high gear and YouTube found itself dealing with complications of its own success. The platform performed very poorly when it came to moderating these harmful posts with only 34% of reported videos being removed, with its sheer size to blame (Gruzd et al., 2023, p. 5, as cited in Szeto et al., 2021). In addition to the poor moderation of content, YouTube’s recommending algorithm proved to be disastrous, creating an environment where users were bombarded with one-sided videos through targeting (Gruzd et al., 2023, p. 5, as cited in Abul-Fottouh et al., 2020).
While there has always been a small number of people that oppose government measures made for the population’s health and safety, it was scary to see how social media seemed to amplify their voices and widen their audience in a way that showed serious ramifications on global vaccine adoption.
After reading about social media platforms and anti-vaccination movements, the scariest thing isn’t the targeted ads that seem to listen to conversations. It’s the power of misinformation and how individuals’ and groups’ unfounded opinions can affect our society’s inner workings when targeting frightened people. Lets all stay safe and well informed!
References
Abul-Fottouh, D., Song, M. Y., & Gruzd, A. (2020). Examining algorithmic biases in YouTube’s recommendations of vaccine video. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 140(104175). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2020.104175
Avaaz. (2020). How Facebook can flatten the curve of the coronavirus infodemic
Gruzd, A., Abul-Fottouh, D., Song, M. Y., & Saiphoo, A. (2023). From Facebook to YouTube: the Potential exposure to COVID-19 anti-vaccine videos on social media. Social Media + Society, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221150403
Szeto, E., Pedersen, K., & Tomlinson, A. (2021, March 30). Marketplace flagged over 800 social media posts with COVID-19 misinformation. Only a fraction were removed. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/marketplace/marketplace-social-media-posts-1.5968539
So true, misinformation is big on socials. Hopefully the library can continue to educate students on how to find reputable resources.
On another note, cool graphics!!
Information literacy is a huge need in today’s society. Not enough emphasis is being put on ensuring that children are being taught this.
It really highlighted the importance of information literacy. With the heightened sense of anxiety, I noticed that people were more susceptible to believing things before evaluating them.
What a challenging time! Not only did the misinformation and fake news cause stress and anxiety in uncertain times, there was so much information being rapidly released it became an information overload. Even if the information was correct there was so much of it, it made people disengage. At one point I had to purposefully not look on social media for a while as it became too much and I needed a break.
It really is scary how much misinformation has been spread since the start of covid, and even before covid. Researching skills are a must these days.
It seems like an endless wave. I was listening to ABC radio, and they were discussing fact-checking and the need to address false information in Norway; they have established a coalition between all the major newspapers that fund a project. Then the major newspapers distribute the news; they noted that the most challenging part is getting as many people as possible to see the correct version.
There are organisations like this, but the ratio of information coming to that being checked must be heavily skewed against them.
I found this one with Twitter and the Facebook Journalism Project listed as funding support.
https://credibilitycoalition.org
Hi Amy,
Great blogpost! I’m all for freedom of speech, though, with all its faults. It’s becoming more important than ever before for us all to recognise ‘fake news’ and unreliable sources when we see them.
Jen
You bring up some excellent points. I think it can get very overwhelming for people trying to find valuable sources of information within the online world of social media; as sifting through the plethora of info available can seem near impossible when there are so many outlets producing content. Sometimes social media’s biggest strength, is also one of its biggest weaknesses for people looking for quality info, as everyone is able to produce and present content, and often this content can be very opinion-based rather than factual.
Wow! It’s amazing to see the figures of misinformation posts. It would be really interesting to see the figures on the increased numbers of posts requiring moderation by platforms.
Its too easy to invent these days as it takes a lot more time to verify things.
And i also enjoy your front page.
Having health conditions where COVID-19 could be considered fatal was and still is a scary thought. I sympathise as to how you must feel in a pandemic period of life. It was interesting to see how social media improved their removal of vaccination misinformation. I noticed Facebook became much better at content review and your statistics show this, however this gave life to apps like Telegram for hosting what was considered alternate views or misinformation.
‘It’s the power of misinformation and how individuals’ and groups’ unfounded opinions can affect our society’s inner workings when targeting frightened people. ‘
Wow Lisa what a striking way to finish your post. Couldn’t agree more at the concept of how social media can be twisted to target the vulnerable. Loved reading this 🙂