Anti-Vaxxers are Winning Their Facebook Battle
Anti-vaxxers have a special place in my Hall of Infamy. They are idiots, plain and simple, and no amount of whining by them or on their behalf will change my opinion. Yes, Big Pharma is a problem, yes there are issues with the financing and distribution of such drugs - well, all drugs - but no, the pseudoscience claptrap of these conspiracy theorists does not cut the mustard with me.
The situation is not looking good for those fighting for truth and science:
Anti-vaccination Facebook Pages are currently better at attracting undecided users to their cause than pro-science counterparts, researchers have found.
As social media sites struggle to purge misinformation and conspiracy theories from their platforms, including campaigns relating to COVID-19, a study has now shown how differing stances on vaccination have evolved and competed over time. The project, led by Neil Johnson, professor of physics at George Washington University, analyzed Facebook communities containing close to 100 million individuals, grouping them into "clusters" to map how members interact, shift and share links.
The clusters were color coded, mapped and analyzed. And the results were surprising, Johnson told Newsweek, describing the current situation as a "perfect storm" that could see legitimate information drowned out by fringe, fake, science.
The findings were not at all what was expected:
"We expected to find a network where establishment medical science/government public health advice ('Blue') forms a very large strong core, surrounded by a small number of fairly disorganized communities expressing a fringe view, like opposing vaccines ('Red'). We found the complete opposite," Johnson said. "Instead, there's a complex, three sided online war over trust in establishment medical science and health guidance—and Red is now in the driving seat.
"Instead of it being a two-sided war of Red vs Blue, anti-vaccination has pulled in the huge population of people who ordinarily don't talk a lot online about such issues; communities on Facebook of pet lovers or parents with a particular interest. These users are akin to a civilian population in an insurgency. We call them 'Green.' Blue is fighting in the wrong place, off to one side."
The team's findings suggested anti-vax Facebook Pages are smaller but more nimble than pro-vaccination communities, appearing to become "heavily entangled" with the much larger groups of users who are yet to fully form their own opinions.
Under present conditions, one predictive model used by the scientists found that anti-vaccination support could reach dominance in approximately 10 years.
The result of all of the disinformation is that 1 in 4 Americans are looking to refuse to get vaccinated in the event of vaccine being created, as abc Action News report:
Sill, when asked about the likelihood of agreeing to get a safe and effective vaccine, the new survey shows some skepticism about being inoculated. One-quarter of Americans said they were not likely to get vaccinated, even if a safe and effective vaccine was developed. About three-quarters said they would likely get the immunization.
The interesting angle is the partisan divide, or not as is the case:
Those Americans who are opposed to getting a vaccine, experts say, often fall into one of two categories. But, unlike most things in American politics and concerning the coronavirus outbreak, those groups are not partisan in nature, with about equal proportions of Democrats and Republicans saying they were likely to get the vaccine.
"There's always been an anti-vaccine group of individuals that are going to refuse vaccines no matter what," said Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease expert, and a professor of medicine, epidemiology and global health at Emory University. "The question is, how do they impact other people."
"You always have a sense of anxiety that this is a new vaccine. Is it safe? Is it effective," del Rio continued. "But if a vaccine is safe, then the problem that you run into is complacency."
"It's not just the skeptics, it's truly ones that don't actively go looking for a vaccine," he added.
Del Rio told ABC News that while the country is generally "very good" at vaccinating children, the number of adults who receive vaccinations pales in comparison, citing the influenza vaccine as an example.
"After the pandemic of influenza, the influenza vaccination...became recommended for every age beyond six months," he said. "We've done really good at vaccinating young people - were getting rates in the order of 40% or so - we're doing terrible vaccinating adults, and we're particularly bad vaccinating adult males."
Over time, del Rio said, people have become "less interested" in vaccines. In a recent Gallup survey, confidence in vaccines has been on the decline. Fewer U.S. adults consider childhood vaccinations to be important than in previous years. The survey, released in March, found that 84% said it's important to vaccine their children, down from 94% in 2001.
This kind of mindset is alien to me, and yet so depressingly prevalent.
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