In the debate on disinformation, which was intense during the pandemic but remained relevant even afterwards, the idea that it is generated by the spread of false news often tends to prevail: events that never happened, presented as if they were real. It is a shared interpretation, the same one that underlies more recent concerns regarding technological advances in the production of counterfeit video and audio using artificial intelligence software. But the idea that fake news is the main cause of misinformation on social media is partly unfounded, because it ignores the effect of true but partial and misleading news.
A research whose results were published in the magazine in May Science analyzed the influence of vaccine misinformation spread on Facebook in 2021. It found that factually correct but suggestive and misleading content circulated much more than false content, which was flagged as such based on third-party verification . In general, news associating vaccines with negative health effects, even in the absence of demonstrable causal links, had an impact on the willingness to get vaccinated declared by US users.
The research was conducted by a group from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Pennsylvania, using a dataset made available by Facebook on user activities from January 2017 to October 2022. Among the approximately 68 million links contained in the dataset the research group selected over 13 thousand, which linked to content related to vaccines and had been shared at least one hundred times on Facebook in the first three months of availability of the Covid vaccine in the United States, between January and March 2021 .
Examining the data, the research group discovered that fake news about vaccines shared on the platform and reported by Facebook as disinformation obtained 8.7 million views in that period: just 0.3 percent of the overall views (2.7 billion ) obtained from all vaccine-related content. Content that had not been flagged by Facebook as misinformation, but which alluded to the possibility that vaccines cause health damage, obtained hundreds of millions of views.
Several titles of real news on vaccines cited in the research, among the most widespread of all on Facebook at the beginning of 2021, are similar to titles of articles also widely circulated among Italian users and other countries. One of the most popular was a site title Cleveland 19 News: “WARNING: Side effects from the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine may be serious.” But the most circulated headline of all was that of a news story from Chicago Tribune, which is the first newspaper in Chicago by circulation and the seventh in the United States: «A “healthy” doctor died two weeks after receiving a vaccine against Covid-19; The CDC is investigating why.” “Cdc” stands for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the most important public health control body in the United States.
The article of Chicago Tribuneaccording to research published on Science, was viewed in the first three months of 2021 approximately 55 million times, a number that represents more than 20 percent of Facebook users in the United States. The number of views of that single story was more than six times higher than the number of views of all stories marked as misinformation combined.
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The research team then measured the impact of 130 vaccine-related headlines on Facebook on the vaccination intentions of more than 18,000 people exposed to those headlines, based on their responses to two questionnaires. Fake news, when viewed, was predictably more likely to reduce people’s intention to receive a vaccine. But by weighing this effect of the news with the number of views, the researchers discovered that suggestive and misleading headlines from credible sources, due to their greater circulation, had on average an impact 46 times greater than the impact of news marked as false.
«Our analysis suggests that Facebook fact-checkers spot the most harmful misinformation, and in this sense Facebook was doing a good job [nel 2021]», he told the newspaper El País MIT researcher Jennifer Allen, co-author of the research. However, according to her, the platforms should more effectively combat the spread of true but ambiguous news, put into circulation by bad faith sources with the aim of promoting misleading stories. And the media should also pay more attention when writing headlines, keeping in mind that articles can be presented out of context. “Competing for clicks is a challenge, but I don’t think that absolves the media of responsibility,” Allen added.
Tuesday 11 June, in an article on Los Angeles Timesthe American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Hiltzik cited a recent example of true news – and with a technically correct title – spread by British Medical Journal (BMJ), one of the most authoritative medical journals in the world, but subject to incorrect and unexpected interpretations by some media. The research, published on June 3 and conducted by a group of researchers from the Netherlands, analyzed the high levels of mortality recorded in Western countries between 2020 and 2022 despite the introduction of Covid vaccines in 2021.
Some newspapers, including the English newspaper Telegraph and the US tabloid New York Post, used the research to implicitly argue that vaccines contributed to increased mortality, rather than reduced it. The popularity obtained on social media by numerous articles of this type has led to the British Medical Journal to write, in a statement released on June 6: «Various press outlets have stated that this research implies a direct causal link between vaccination against Covid-19 and mortality. This study does not establish any such connection.”
Some researchers wrote on their social media channels that the research is so irrelevant that it should not have been published at all. Israeli economist and statistician Ariel Karlinsky, author of some of the data used by the Dutch research team, wrote that the journal should retract the research and investigate the entire editing and review process that led to its publication. But the use that anti-vaxers have made of the research of British Medical JournalHiltzik wrote on the Los Angeles Timesis a very significant example of how even the most authoritative sources can contribute to misinformation even without wanting to.
Although in studies dealing with it, disinformation is often associated with fake news, the authors of the recent research published in Sciencethe most persuasive forms of disinformation probably come from misleading statements published by traditional sources, more or less authoritative, and then disseminated through channels that guide their interpretation.
