Influencers played outsized role in pushing anti-vax conspiracies
Influencers played outsized role in pushing anti-vax conspiracies
Alison Snyder AND Sara Fischer at Axios
Axios on facebookAxios on twitterAxios on linkedinAxios on email
https://www.axios.com/influencers-anti-vax-covid-conspiracies-misinformation-acd4bf95-67ca-4a31-a142-f823490228cb.html
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A new report from a broad range of disinformation experts finds influencers across many topics — wellness, politics and religion — were largely responsible for spreading viral anti-vaccination content in the U.S. over the past two years.
Why it matters: Influencers with large followings often introduced new and personal angles to familiar anti-vax tropes, making it difficult for social media companies to moderate their comments without running into free speech issues.
Details: The report from the Stanford Internet Observatory, Graphika and several universities and institutes, found that the same subset of recurring actors, including political leaders and celebrities, were often the ones most effective at spreading misinformation widely.
Many relied on tropes tied to other conspiracies, like QAnon, or religious narratives to seed new falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccines.One example includes a tweet from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and an interview from Kanye West that baselessly argue the vaccine would be the "Mark of the Beast," or a biblical reference to a societally restrictive scar imposed on people by the Antichrist.
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