The Small, Small World of Facebook’s Anti-vaxxers
Look up vaccinations on Facebook, as Representative Adam Schiff did last week, and the results will show a rich supply of anti-vaccination posts, pages, and groups. Such propaganda appears to be flourishing online, drawing the uninitiated into a tangled web of sources through algorithmic recommendations and human shares.
Facebook, for its part, laments the reach of such “health-related misinformation.” But the company can also use the presumed complexity for cover. If the anti-vaccination posts are widely distributed, then fixing this misinformation problem becomes massively more difficult. Imagine that hundreds of thousands of people are responsible for the anti-vaccine chatter: To take action against such a network could cause huge ripples in the makeup of the network. Sensitive to cries of censorship, Facebook would shy away from intervening.
However, while Facebook’s scale might as well be infinite, the actual universe of people arguing about. I found that a relatively small network of pages creates most of the anti-vaccine content that is widely shared. At the same time, a small network of “pro-science” pages also experiences viral success countering the anti-vax posts.
