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posted by martyb on Friday May 15 2020, @10:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the thought-you-were-reading-El-Reg-for-a-moment? dept.

Jennifer Ouellette over at Ars Technica is reporting on new research on "how distrust in health expertise spreads through social networks."

The article, published on 13 May, in the journal Nature compares network relationships within both pro and anti vaccination groups on Facebook. From the Ars piece:

Last year, the United States reported the greatest number of measles cases since 1992. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 1,282 individual cases of measles in 31 states in 2019, and the majority were among people who were not vaccinated against measles. It was yet another example of how the proliferation of anti-vaccine messaging has put public health at risk, and the COVID-19 pandemic is only intensifying the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

But there may be hope: researchers have developed a "map" of how distrust in health expertise spreads through social networks, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Such a map could help public health advocates better target their messaging efforts.

[...] [Lead author]Johnson and his colleagues analyzed Facebook communities actively posting about the topic of vaccines during the 2019 measles outbreak—more than 100 million users in all—from around the world, mapping out the interconnected networks of information across cities, countries, continents, and languages. There were three main camps: communities that were pro-vaccine, communities that were anti-vaccine, and communities that were neutral or undecided regarding the topic (groups focused on parenting, for instance).

The researchers then tracked how the various communities interacted with each other to create a detailed map of the networks. "It's not geographic, it's to do with closeness in a social network sense—in terms of information, influence," Johnson told Ars. "It's not whether I'm here and someone's in Australia. It's the fact that someone in Australia agrees with my slightly twisted narrative on COVID-19 and I'm getting their feed. Although my neighbor doesn't understand me, the person in Australia does.

[...] The results were surprisingly counter-intuitive. While there were fewer individual people who were anti-vaccine on Facebook, there were almost three times as many anti-vax communities clustered around Facebook groups and pages. So any pro-vaccine groups seeking to counter the anti-vaccine misinformation often targeted larger communities and missed the small- to medium-sized clusters growing rapidly just under their radar, according to Johnson.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the spread of misinformation has gotten even worse. "We didn't stop the day we submitted this paper," said Johnson. "We've been monitoring every day, every minute, the conversations and what you see in these Facebook pages, in these clusters, these communities. It's gone into hyper drive since COVID-19." He and his colleagues developed a predictive model for the spread, which showed anti-vaccine sentiment dominating public discourse on the topic within a decade. Furthermore, "that was a worst-case scenario if nothing was done as of December 2019, when we submitted the paper," said Johnson. "Now it's amplified. If we did that same study now, I think it would be a lot faster than ten years because of the COVID-19 situation. It's the perfect storm."

[...] A new study [Abstract. Preprint PDF available for download] published in the journal BMJ Global Health bolsters Johnson et al.'s findings. Scientists at the University of Ottawa in Canada searched YouTube for the most widely viewed videos in English relating to COVID-19. They narrowed it down to 69 videos with more than 247 million views between them and then assessed the quality of the videos and the reliability of the information presented in each using a system developed specifically for public health emergencies.

The majority of the videos (72.5 percent) presented only factual information. The bad news is that 27.5 percent, or one in four, contained misleading or inaccurate information, such as believing pharmaceutical companies were sitting on a cure and refusing to sell it; incorrect public health recommendations; racist content; and outright conspiracy theories. Those videos—which mostly came from entertainment news, network, and Internet news sources—accounted for about a quarter of the total views (roughly 62 million views). The videos that scored the highest in terms of accuracy, quality, and usefulness for the public, by contrast, didn't rack up nearly as many views.

DOI: Nature, 2020. 10.1038/s41586-020-2281-1
DOI: BMJ Global Health, 2020. 10.1136/bmjgh-2020-002604 [Full paper here, gratis]


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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday May 16 2020, @08:10AM (5 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Saturday May 16 2020, @08:10AM (#994917) Journal

    Am I missing some huge breakthrough, or vaccination against a moving target like coronavirus is a waste of time? Are we sure they will nail the vaccine this time for the first time? What am I saying. Are we sure the metric of success for the vaccine according to them is the same as we imply?
    because not nailing it or nailing it their way may result in another Bergamo for us, at best.

    But since these guys are concerned with science "the effectiveness of the vaccine is not a factor in the study, all we do is modeling", and since the submitter and some 50c army commenters are concerned with PROPAGANDA!!! the main item "trust the vaccine against coronavirus" is implicit.

    --
    Account abandoned.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2020, @05:46PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2020, @05:46PM (#995069)

    > Am I missing some huge breakthrough

    Yes.

    Several. First there was the Dark Ages - a long period of ignorance and superstition. Then along came the Renaissance and notions of liberty. One day someone invented science which led on to the Industrial Revolution. Workers rights and emancipation of women came next - arguably we're on the tail end of that. I think that about covers it for today.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2020, @07:42PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2020, @07:42PM (#995110)

      Personally, I think you are wasting your time. It appears to me that Bot is still stuck somewhere in the neolithic era.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2020, @10:15PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2020, @10:15PM (#995157)

      Maybe if your ilk learned to read, and to parse the written words, then the urge to parrot every chunk of bullshit spewed by your gurus would somewhat relax its hold on your cephalic ganglia.
      Those of sapient species, unlike you, do know that biology is a science and not a faith. Moreover, some of us know the scientific fact that vaccines are not a panacea in each and every case; which is natural, given bacteria and viruses had hundreds millions of years to evolve workarounds for the immune systems of their hosts. Some of us even know the scientific fact that Coronaviridae is one of the groups of viruses against whom attempts to create vaccines met very limited success. Observe the feline coronavirus (FCoV); its symptomatic infection, feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) is 100% deadly; still, we have no reliable vaccine to this day, despite multiple attempts.
      https://www.vet.cornell.edu/departments-centers-and-institutes/cornell-feline-health-center/health-information/feline-health-topics/feline-vaccines-benefits-and-risks [cornell.edu]

      Taking things on faith and calling it "science" is lying to yourself. Mindlessly screaming those things at others is lying to people. The only way to KNOW anything of biology is to damn LEARN IT !!! Go and LEARN IT, you morons, and do please SHUT UP till you do!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 17 2020, @02:21AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 17 2020, @02:21AM (#995218)

      Several. First there was the Dark Ages - a long period of ignorance and superstition. Then along came the Renaissance and notions of liberty.

      Since the Dark Ages are called that mostly because there is little reliable documentation about that era, you're misunderstanding things.

      In fact, there were significant technological advancements [wikipedia.org] during that period.

      Bot is talking out of his ass [soylentnews.org] and should be smacked down hard.

      However, spouting *different bullshit* is a poor and ineffective way to do so. Try and do better next time.

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday May 16 2020, @09:41PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 16 2020, @09:41PM (#995148) Homepage Journal

    As I heard it recently, the aspect of the virus they're making vaccines against are essential to its functioning, and appear to be the same in all the various strains.