![]() The international non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has also conducted extensive research into the online anti-vaccine ecosystem, the way vaccine disinformation thrives online and who benefits from it. The consortium is building on strategies developed during the US election to inform social media companies and public health officials about disinformation and provide accurate vaccine-related information to the public. The Virality Project, a coalition of US research entities, was launched in February to detect, analyse and respond to incidents of Covid-19 vaccine disinformation online, and mitigate the harmful effects that misleading content could have on public trust in vaccines. With the World Health Organisation listing vaccine hesitancy as one of the top ten threats to world health, the spread of false information on far-reaching social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook is a legitimate and urgent cause for concern. Stopping the spreadĪnalysis by the British Medical Journal has directly linked deliberate ‘foreign disinformation’ campaigns on social media to falling vaccination rates. The non-profit news platform Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has since alleged that a network of Russian marketing companies are behind the campaigns targeting high-profile social media influencers to spread disinformation. Grasset said the agency, Fazze, refused to disclose the name of its client and that its employees’ LinkedIn profiles, which have since been removed, showed them all to have previously worked in Russia. Et Ça Se Dit Médecin, a hospital intern with over 87,000 Instagram followers, told French news channel BFMTV he was offered more than €2,000 by the agency to post a story containing similar information. Léo Grasset, a French YouTuber with over one million subscribers, was asked to spread the false claim that deaths from the Pfizer vaccine – the most widely used Covid-19 jab in France – are almost three times higher than those from AstraZeneca’s candidate. The influencers, which include popular health and science content creators, were asked to tell their followers that the jab was responsible for thousands of deaths and “present the material as own independent view”. Just last week, a number of French and German social media influencers said they had been offered large sums of money by a supposedly UK-based PR agency to share false, disparaging claims about the safety of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. Media outlets aren’t the only platform being used to sow vaccine disinformation.
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