How instagram anti-vaccines promote their conspiracy theories

The coronavirus pandemic has generated a new wave of viral (in every sense) misinformation.

Instagram fake countermeasures could do nothing about the flood of misinformation about vaccines. Anti-vaccine conspiracy theories that are not corroborated by facts continue to bloom in the appendix. These theories are further processed by indexing algorithms and are recommended by Instagram.

In the days of COVID-19, the problem only worsened. The coronavirus pandemic has led to a new surge in viral disinformation, widely supported by the vaccination movement. Facebook moderators belatedly respond to statements about content that potentially violates the rules of the social network.

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Like Facebook, Instagram does not explicitly prohibit anti-vaccination content, while the company claims to make it less visible to users. The company claims that some hashtags are being blocked and efforts are being made so that anti-vaccination posts are more difficult to find in application services such as Explore. However, accounts that promote conspiracy theories and false vaccine information are high on the app’s search results.

When you search for the word “vaccine” on Instagram, the app recommends dozens of anti-vaccine accounts in the top search results. Accounts with names such as “Vaccines_revealed”, “Vaccinesuncovered”, “drugines_kill_” (“drugs_ kill_”), “Vacinesaregenocide_” (“black and white”) ») Have long and reliably reached the top. Some of these accounts are very popular, they have about hundreds of thousands of subscribers, while others have only a few hundred. However, as the most relevant accounts for the query “vaccine,” the Instagram algorithm sequentially recommends these accounts instead of verified medical organizations.

Accounts that promote conspiracy theories and false vaccine information are high on the search results.

Many of these messages deliberately spread fear - they are aimed at parents - and publish clearly false statements, such as that "vaccines lead to autism." The trend is now conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and the coronavirus pandemic.

Instagram’s recommendation algorithm also encourages users to spread conspiracy theories, including vaccines and COVID-19.

I created a new Instagram account (so that the social network does not take into account my activity in my personal account) and searched for the term “vaccine”. After a couple of seconds, the application asked me to subscribe to pages on anti-vaccination and other conspiracy theories, including QAnon . This is also not a new phenomenon. Last year, Vice noted that Instagram recommendations easily lead users to a rabbit hole. The media company promised that it would study the phenomenon in more detail, but so far no news has been heard from them.

Not only do such suggestions still appear, these recommendations are now pushing users to other conspiracy theories. All I needed was a subscription to four anti-vaccination accounts so that Instagram would start recommending the popular QAnon pages to me, one of which was related to the Plandemic Facebook documentary. A couple of days later, the application sent push notifications, recommending to visit two more pages about QAnon.

Representatives of Instagram just do what they repeat: the company seeks to make vaccine disinformation difficult to find.

Searching for specific hashtags also pushes users into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.

The #vaccine hashtag search results suggest that you first visit the CDC website (federal agency of the US Department of Health) and contain relatively sanitized results. But also when searching on hashtags, Instagram recommends other “related” searches, which are much less filtered, including #vaccineinjuryadvocate (# advocates for vaccine sufferers) and # vaççineskillandinjure (# vaccines kill and injure). (Using the symbol “ç” (cedilla) instead of “c” is a common anti-vaccination tactic to avoid being detected by Instagram filtering algorithms.)

And if you look at the search results for these recommended hashtags, like #vaccineinjuryadvocate, Instagram further offers even more hashtags related to various other conspiracy theories, including coronavirus conspiracy theories: #plandemic (#plandemics), #governmentconspiracy (#governmental conspiracy), #populationcontrol (#population control) and #scamdemic (#scandium). (Currently, Instagram has blocked search results for #plandemic, which has more than 26,000 posts, according to application statistics.)

The Instagram algorithm recommending hashtags related to conspiracy theories is not limited to vaccines. When searching on # 5G, the application produces “related hashtags”, such as #fuckbillgates (# fucking bill gates) #billgatesisevil (# billgatesetzlozo) #chemtrails (#chemical trace) and #coronahoax (#crown deception). Other seemingly innocuous requests, such as # 5Gtowers (# 5G towers), also lead to conspiracy theories, for example #projectbluebeam (#project blue radiation), #markofthebeast (# brand-name beast), #epsteindidntkillhimself (#eptest kill).

Instagram misinformation

All of these problems are by no means new to Instagram, but the photo-sharing service often escapes the same harsh scrutiny Facebook faces. When company officials testified before Congress, they downplayed the role of Instagram in spreading Russian misinformation ( translator’s note - apparently this refers to accusations against Russia allegedly influencing the 2016 presidential election ). A follow-up report by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Instagram "was the most effective tool used by the IRA."

The problem, according to those who study it, is that misinformation on Instagram often takes the form of memes and similar images, which are more difficult for analyzing systems to detect, and it is more difficult for company moderators to understand them. And while Instagram is developing new systems to solve this problem, images can be a much more effective channel for destructive actors, says Paul Barrett, deputy director of the New York Business and Human Rights Center at Stern.

“Disinformation, which includes anti-vaccination materials, is increasingly taking the form of game visualization. This is not something that is done through large volumes of text, ”said Barrett. “Visual material is perceived more simply, it is not perceived as threatening. And I think that makes Instagram more appealing to lies distributors than other social networks. ”

Yet Instagram is much slower at dealing with the misinformation issue than Facebook. The photo-sharing application did not make any fact-checking efforts until May last year - almost three years after Facebook began to refute allegations that it was controlled externally. And the app has just recently begun to change to make dubious posts less visible in user feeds.

And although Instagram, like Facebook, clearly defined the criteria for determining disinformation about coronavirus, the company does not seem to consider the content of anti-vaccination accounts (the activities of which experts associate with measles outbreaks) to be as pressing an issue as replicating theories of conspiracy about coronavirus .

“We prioritize certain types of content, such as child safety, suicide and injury, terrorism and harmful misinformation related to COVID, to be sure that we address the most basic issues that pose a potential danger,” Mark Zuckerberg said during a conversation with reporters this week discussing efforts to moderate Facebook content.

When asked if the company prioritizes vaccine content, given the connection between this topic and coronavirus misinformation, Facebook vice president Guy Rosen answered evasively: “It’s extremely important to set priorities to prevent the spread of topics that are harmful to health” .

An Instagram spokeswoman told Engadget that the company does not ban anti-vaccinators, but noted that some posts with misinformation related to recent measles outbreaks in Samoa and polio in Pakistan have been removed. Officials in both countries accused those who planted disinformation that the mood against vaccination was increasing among the population.

However, in most cases, the company does not take actions to remove such content completely, simply trying to make it less visible or adding “false information” tags to the posts if the content was exposed by fact checkers.

But fact-checking is not enough, Barrett said. “The scale of the problem is so enormous that it is naive to believe that a fact check - even if it is carried out vigorously - will be able to weed out a significant part of the false information that is constantly published. When it comes to billions of publications per day, even if you have 60 fact-checking teams around the world, many of these publications pass by moderators. ”