Pinterest sets an example in the fight against vaccine misinformation

In the era of hyper-available information, the great fight being waged is against misinformation. The new coronavirus pandemic has exposed both sides of a battle that has been going on for some time in an even more aggressive way. Health experts, influencers, politicians, online platform leaders and the general public close ranks. The role of social networks has been fundamental, for better or for worse, usage policies and prevention measures have emerged, on the part of Twitter, for example, or Facebook, but the reference in this field is Pinterest, for example. penalties, according to STAT.

The platform, where you can find ideas for everything, from clothes to food, including tattoos or tourist recommendations, has defined an intransigence position when it comes to health misinformation. And, when it comes to fake news about vaccines, Pinterest has zero tolerance.

In recent months we have witnessed different approaches, such as that of Twitter and the removal of publications, or that of Facebook, and the argument of defending freedom of expression, which legitimizes the commercial purposes of the platform, which is why Pinterest and its stance begin to attract the sympathy and preference of specialists

“The Pinterest results suggest that if Facebook increases its moderation, it could go further,” says Neil Johnson, professor of Physics and researcher at the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University.

Pinterest focuses on the path against misinformation in its mission statement: Inspire people to do the things they love. Facebook makes connections, regardless of whether they foment hate, for example – while Pinterest seeks positivity. “There is nothing inspiring about harmful misinformation that could affect your health or your family’s health or the health of your community,” argues Sarah Bromma, the company’s head of policy.

The strategy isn’t perfect, of course. There are still plenty of “pin” collections that encourage non-evidence-based treatments for issues like anxiety and weight loss. However, overall, the approach has produced some positive results, especially with regards to vaccine misinformation, which was once common on Pinterest.

Unlike Facebook, which has separate teams for safety and health, Pinterest considers public safety and individual or community health as two sides of the same coin. Its health misinformation policy states that any content that could result in immediate and negative effects on someone’s health or the safety of the general public has no place on the platform. There are no exceptions for prominent political leaders or celebrities.

“Content that incites violence, or false and misleading health information, or hateful content — all of these things we see as antithetical to inspiration,” Bromma said.

Users searching for vaccines or Covid-19 and any related terms are shown results only from Pinterest boards maintained by the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

In the case of vaccines and Covid-19, issues that simultaneously threaten individual health and public safety, the company has increased its anti-disinformation tactics. For example, ahead of the planned release of the second conspiracy film “Plandemic,” Pinterest had its moderators proactively search for terms that could have been associated with the film, eliminating them to nip any problematic content in the bud. (The second film, which was the complete version of the first, did not go viral in the same way.)

Pinterest has also suspended people from the platform who violate this policy, including prominent vaccine conspiracy theorist Larry Cook.

Facebook also points people who use its search feature to information about vaccines and Covid-19 from the CDC and WHO. But it hasn’t given rise to a growing tide of groups and pages spreading falsehoods about both issues, according to Johnson and other experts who monitor misinformation on social media.

In a July report assessing the growing influence of anti-vaccination content on social media, the UK-based Non-Profit Center for Countering Digital Hate found that so-called “anti-vaccination entrepreneurs” — people who sell or profit from vaccine misinformation — they gained a total of 28 million people on Facebook and saw their followers grow by 854,000 between May and June. In Facebook groups, researchers identified 64 who regularly shared vaccine misinformation, with a collective of 1 million that has also continued to grow.

For Pinterest, responding to misinformation is not a static strategy, Bromma said. Rather, the company’s approach is intended to change step by step with regular guidance from public health organizations, including the WHO and CDC.

For example, in February, when the CDC warned against hoarding masks and said they were not necessary for the general public, Pinterest banned ads for face masks and began delisting users’ posts about them. When the CDC changed its guidance to encourage mask-wearing, Pinterest jumped in, once again allowing advertisers and the public to share content about masks, including homemade coverings.

Pinterest’s moves are overall a positive effort, Johnson said. But given Pinterest’s small footprint within the broader social media landscape, they only serve as a small Band-Aid on a much larger problem.

Online networks have a way of fostering increasingly extremist ideologies, according to Johnson’s research. This happens mainly because social media communities – in particular Facebook groups, for example – connect extremists who would otherwise be silenced by a more vocal and rational majority. When people cannot find others who defend their misinformed beliefs, they simply migrate to a new group or social network.

“It’s like a forest fire,” Johnson said. “People just drive by. If they don’t find what they want – and we’ve seen this with vaccines – they just work around it to another space.”

While vaccine-related falsehoods only appear to have spread further on Facebook since the start of the pandemic, the conflagration has been smoldering for some time, according to Johnson and his colleagues, who published a study in Nature in May. which showed a considerable increase in followers of pages promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric between February and October 2019.

The problem is especially dire because of the way Facebook appears to help extremists recruit new followers: Johnson found, for example, that while pages spreading vaccine myths had fewer followers than factual pages, pages spreading falsehoods were higher in number, increasingly faster and increasingly linked to neutral pages where people did not yet have a clear inclination one way or another. If the trend continues, Johnson predicted that anti-vaccination rhetoric will dominate on the platform by 2030.

Experts have also raised questions about some of the tactics Facebook has implemented in response to Covid-19 misinformation. After deleting a false post about the pandemic, Facebook places a generic message with links to the WHO myth website in the feeds of any users who “liked” or commented on it. Experts — including the researchers whose studies Facebook said it based its strategy on — said they believe Facebook misinterpreted its work. Rather than placing a generic post at the top of users’ feeds, experts favored more direct messages to users that included specific corrections to the falsehood.

For policymakers to comprehensively address the problem of disinformation on social media, Johnson said they need a research-oriented guide that details where extremists are making connections online and how they are recruiting more moderate or undecided individuals.

“You won’t win this battle if you don’t have a map of the battlefield,” Johnson said.

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