Via CBC News: 'It's a war around the truth': Health experts, Facebook and YouTube play catch-up with anti-vaxxers. Excerpt:
With 15 cases of measles now reported in a British Columbia outbreak, both the medical community and social media companies need to step up their game in combating anti-vaccination misinformation that continues to spread — largely uncensored — on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, experts say.
"This is huge," said Fuyuki Kurasawa, director of the global digital citizenship lab at York University in Toronto. "It's a war around the truth and around information and it's a major public health crisis."
Because of the widespread availability of vaccinations, "measles was actually declared eliminated in Canada in 1998, and the cases that we still do see are linked to travel. When outbreaks occur, they tell us that some groups of people do not have adequate immunity," the Public Health Agency of Canada said in a statement.
If vaccine coverage drops below 95 per cent in a community, the risk of infection rises, the agency said, noting the current national level of coverage is 89 per cent.
Measles killed more than 110,000 people around the world in 2017 — most of them children under five, according to the World Health Organization. This year, the organization has identified the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate against preventable diseases — known as "vaccine hesitancy" — as one of the top 10 threats to global health.
Social media showdown
Yet, despite the fact they're on the wrong side of the scientific evidence, Kurasawa said, anti-vaccination advocates — also known as "anti-vaxxers" — have gained the upper hand in a raging social media battle.
That's because public health authorities have been "relatively slow" to respond to anti-vaccination propaganda in ways that are appealing to social media audiences, he said. Instead, they have relied on the assumption that "putting out the truth and factual information" is enough.
But social media "relies on short, relatively catchy or attention-grabbing memes, messages, videos ... an informal tone," Kurasawa said.
Anti-vaccination groups have mastered that style — attracting people to false content ranging from claims that vaccines cause autism (an idea that was scientifically debunked long ago) to insisting that being infected by measles as a child can protect against heart disease and cancer later in life.
Some anti-vaccination groups also solicit donations online from their supporters to continue making — and sometimes advertising — such content.
"They've been very savvy. They've been very well funded," said Richard Carpiano, a professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Riverside.
It's a stark contrast to the approach public health authorities have taken in disseminating information, he said.
"They've been kind of really heavily pushing on a very old type of model of medical authority," Carpiano said. "You know, 'trust us ... I'm a doctor and I tell you that vaccines are good. And here's our website.'"
