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Moscow's measles misinformation
Cases of the measles are on the rise pretty much everywhere you look.
As of this week, the United States has already had more confirmed cases — 465 — in 2019 than it did in all of last year. It is well on its way to surpassing the 667 cases reported in 2014, the year with the most this century.
The largest outbreak is in New York City, where officials declared a public health emergency yesterday that will see mandatory vaccination in some neighbourhoods, but there are also significant clusters in Michigan, California, and 16 other states.
Health Canada's latest report lists 28 confirmed cases nationwide as of March 23, but that doesn't include newer outbreaks in Ottawa, Montreal and on Vancouver Island.
Australia, with 92 confirmed cases, has almost surpassed its 2018 total. Hong Kong, with 61 cases, already has.
There are reports of galloping measles outbreaks in New Zealand and Bulgaria.
The number of cases in places where the vaccine is readily available pales in comparison to those countries where immunization rates remain low due to conflict or poverty.
Ukraine suffered 64,000 confirmed cases last year, according to the World Health Organization. India had 63,000, while Madagascar had 59,000, Pakistan 34,000 and the Philippines 19,000.
And incidents of the disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yemen, where reliable information is hard to come by, may have been even higher, it says.
In the West, much of the discussion about the rising rate of measles has been focused on anti-vaxxers, or their more indecisive cousins, politely called the vaccine hesitant.
But there are indications that another force might be driving the debate over vaccines — Russian bots and trolls.
A study published in the American Journal of Public Health last fall examined close to 1.8 million tweets sent between 2014 and 2017, and concluded that the preponderance of vaccine content — both for and against immunization — was coming from Russian-controlled accounts.
This "weaponization" of information about health was part of a wider effort to spread discordand erode trust, say the researchers. It may have been more successful than efforts aimed at the 2016 U.S. elections — the study found that 93 per cent of all vaccine tweets appeared to be coming from malicious, automated accounts.
There are also reports that Russian disinformation played a significant role in Europe's 2018 measles outbreak, which sickened 82,000 people and killed 72, with anti-vaccine messages contributing to a marked decline in immunization in southern and eastern countries.
If so, it wouldn't be the first time that a Russian government promoted false information about a health crisis. Back in the mid-1980s, the Soviets mounted Operation Infektion, a concerted effort to spread false news stories suggesting that the HIV virus had been secretly created by the U.S. government to target black and gay people. It worked well enough that a poll in the early 2000s suggested almost a quarter of African-Americans believed that AIDS originated in a government lab.
Social media platforms like Pinterest and Facebook have recently begun to clamp down on anti-vaccine content. But rising concerns about false foreign accounts are likely to fuel calls for government regulations.
A new white paper about "Online Harms," published this month by the U.K. Home Office and Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport, justifies its call for tough, new internet rules by citing an Oxford University study that found evidence of "organized social media manipulation" in 48 countries in 2018.
"The tolerance of conflicting views and ideas are core facets of our democracy. However, these are inherently vulnerable to the efforts of a few to manipulate and confuse the information environment for nefarious purposes, including undermining trust," says the discussion paper, identifying Russia as a "major source" of the disinformation.
The U.K. government is talking about mandating social media companies to flag automated accounts and make unreliable content less visible to users as part of a new corporate "duty of care" to be enforced with fines and other legal punishments.
But as this blog points out, it's unclear what the government intends to do about all the vaccine misinformation that is being spread by people who sincerely believe that Dr. Google is more reliable than decades of peer-reviewed science.
Russian bots are surely a problem, but the Vaccine Confidence Project that tracks immunization scares and rumours still ranks the St. Petersburg troll farms as the third-biggest threat to vaccine uptake, behind bad science and the many people who capitalize on disbelief by flogging anti-vaxxer books, services and potions.
As of this week, the United States has already had more confirmed cases — 465 — in 2019 than it did in all of last year. It is well on its way to surpassing the 667 cases reported in 2014, the year with the most this century.
The largest outbreak is in New York City, where officials declared a public health emergency yesterday that will see mandatory vaccination in some neighbourhoods, but there are also significant clusters in Michigan, California, and 16 other states.
Health Canada's latest report lists 28 confirmed cases nationwide as of March 23, but that doesn't include newer outbreaks in Ottawa, Montreal and on Vancouver Island.
Australia, with 92 confirmed cases, has almost surpassed its 2018 total. Hong Kong, with 61 cases, already has.
There are reports of galloping measles outbreaks in New Zealand and Bulgaria.
The number of cases in places where the vaccine is readily available pales in comparison to those countries where immunization rates remain low due to conflict or poverty.
Ukraine suffered 64,000 confirmed cases last year, according to the World Health Organization. India had 63,000, while Madagascar had 59,000, Pakistan 34,000 and the Philippines 19,000.
And incidents of the disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yemen, where reliable information is hard to come by, may have been even higher, it says.
In the West, much of the discussion about the rising rate of measles has been focused on anti-vaxxers, or their more indecisive cousins, politely called the vaccine hesitant.
But there are indications that another force might be driving the debate over vaccines — Russian bots and trolls.
A study published in the American Journal of Public Health last fall examined close to 1.8 million tweets sent between 2014 and 2017, and concluded that the preponderance of vaccine content — both for and against immunization — was coming from Russian-controlled accounts.
This "weaponization" of information about health was part of a wider effort to spread discordand erode trust, say the researchers. It may have been more successful than efforts aimed at the 2016 U.S. elections — the study found that 93 per cent of all vaccine tweets appeared to be coming from malicious, automated accounts.
There are also reports that Russian disinformation played a significant role in Europe's 2018 measles outbreak, which sickened 82,000 people and killed 72, with anti-vaccine messages contributing to a marked decline in immunization in southern and eastern countries.
If so, it wouldn't be the first time that a Russian government promoted false information about a health crisis. Back in the mid-1980s, the Soviets mounted Operation Infektion, a concerted effort to spread false news stories suggesting that the HIV virus had been secretly created by the U.S. government to target black and gay people. It worked well enough that a poll in the early 2000s suggested almost a quarter of African-Americans believed that AIDS originated in a government lab.
Social media platforms like Pinterest and Facebook have recently begun to clamp down on anti-vaccine content. But rising concerns about false foreign accounts are likely to fuel calls for government regulations.
A new white paper about "Online Harms," published this month by the U.K. Home Office and Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport, justifies its call for tough, new internet rules by citing an Oxford University study that found evidence of "organized social media manipulation" in 48 countries in 2018.
"The tolerance of conflicting views and ideas are core facets of our democracy. However, these are inherently vulnerable to the efforts of a few to manipulate and confuse the information environment for nefarious purposes, including undermining trust," says the discussion paper, identifying Russia as a "major source" of the disinformation.
The U.K. government is talking about mandating social media companies to flag automated accounts and make unreliable content less visible to users as part of a new corporate "duty of care" to be enforced with fines and other legal punishments.
But as this blog points out, it's unclear what the government intends to do about all the vaccine misinformation that is being spread by people who sincerely believe that Dr. Google is more reliable than decades of peer-reviewed science.
Russian bots are surely a problem, but the Vaccine Confidence Project that tracks immunization scares and rumours still ranks the St. Petersburg troll farms as the third-biggest threat to vaccine uptake, behind bad science and the many people who capitalize on disbelief by flogging anti-vaxxer books, services and potions.
