It’s difficult to research vaccine misinformation without feeling like you’re getting pulled down some kind of rabbit hole. To a lesser extent, it’s getting harder to actually research vaccine misinformation- Facebook, Twitter and Google are increasingly good at removing information that remains unverifiable, or information that’s outright false. What do you do when you try and find the information that’s false, other than articles from the ABC or similar that debunk this?
If you will, change the perspective from a reporter finding information for a story to someone who’s predisposed to biting on conspiracy theories. Not finding this information on these popular resources will make them feel disenfranchised and drive them towards new alt-social media platforms.
Tauel Harper from the University of Western Australia is working on their Coronavax project, and he echoes these concerns.
“It’s pushing that discussion out of the public eye, and that makes it harder to actually understand what people are concerned about, and respond to that and engage with that and so on. It makes it more radical and dangerous”
The follow on effects of this push are becoming observable. A data mapping project like Coronavax can only go so far, losing the thread when the discussion leaves the public eye, so the questions are all regarding what happens when this happens.
“On Signal, or telegram, you can kinda go anywhere and create a new community as long as you’ve got your followers and your subscription lists, you can kind of just use this new platform. So there’s other ways for them to kind of spread their misinformation, and of course you’ve got people you can use as nodes to push that information back onto Facebook and on to Twitter, or whatever, so while the policing is happening it’s not particularly effective”.
These alternative platforms, which are now even being described as alt-tech, or alternatives to mainstream platforms, pride themselves on championing free or unmonitored speech. This is why they’ve become bastions of the alt-right and why people like Harper find the information so hard to track.
In a quest to track down someone to talk to about their consumption of content like this- one of the nodes Harper mentions above- I attempted to create an account on Parler to try and track this misinformation myself. What I found was a platform who, despite their messaging about freedom of expression, wasn’t taking on any new users, which feels at odds with their core principles of being.
In hindsight this may have been for the best, because of the aforementioned rabbit hole effect, but the information is out there if you look hard enough. As Harper discusses, as Facebook/Google/YouTube’s fact checking gets better, these creators and their nodes are being driven off these platforms.
“I do think that if people are passionate, like these people are, about their cause, then they will find ways of engaging and interacting with each other in ways that cannot be surveyed or monitored. Partly what’s happening here is that we can monitor what normal people say on Facebook, like the common or the general discussion of what’s happening on Facebook, but we can’t really monitor what’s happening on Signal or Telegram”.
While I wouldn’t describe myself as someone ‘passionate’ like the aforementioned, finding this information was important, albeit for different reasons. In my experience, the information you find on Google is authoritative information from trusted sources debunking the misinformation, as on Facebook, YouTube, etcetera. The comments sections on all videos discussing the titan of coronavirus misinformation video ‘Plandemic’ use its removal as ammo against censorship, for example. In order to find primary sources, I had to change internet browsers and internet browsers to find information that hadn’t been scrubbed by Google in a quest for reputability.
It is important to privilege information over misinformation, yes, but it’s also undeniable that this comes at the cost of marginalizing the fence sitter, who sees that these organisations are making decisions over the ‘value’ of information. As Harper discusses, and as I found in my research, these companies have made it difficult to find misinformation at its source, but the next step is to question the effect stemming the tide has on the general population.
Featured image: a robot and a nun preside over a funeral for the alt-right, represented by a detached Alt key from a keyboard. “Funeral for the Alt-right – Funeral Conductor” by Ross_Angus is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
