Opinion: Tech platforms must move against the anti-vaxxers now
A bottle of measles, mumps and rubella virus vaccine at the Salt Lake County Health Department in Salt Lake City. By Molly Roberts Molly Roberts Editorial writer covering technology and society Email Bio Follow Editorial Writer May 23 Vaccines don’t kill, but insisting otherwise can. Facebook, Google and Twitter know that — which is why, as measles outbreaks send children to intensive-care units across the country, they have all decided to do something about it.
It’s not a perfect metric. Neither is anything else. Even amid the messiness, though, agitating against life-saving inoculations falls cleanly on the wrong side of the line. Health officials studying the resurgence of a disease that was supposed to have been eliminated in this country almost two decades ago have made it clear: The outbreak of misinformation online is facilitating literal outbreaks of disease.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, has stopped anti-vaccination channels from running ads, and says hoaxes will appear less often in its “up next” module. When viewers do watch those videos, they’ll also see “information panels” with corrective context. Twitter has created a tool that pulls up a handy link to a government website offering facts about vaccination for anyone who searches for the subject, and it won’t auto-suggest terms that tend to lure people toward the inaccurate.
You can’t fill a data void with more emptiness, so approaches that don’t also surface enough authoritative sources to replace the junk have a fatal flaw. Twitter’s pop-ups help solve that half of the problem by linking to a government site, but the platform leaves alone the anti-vax content that appears right below. YouTube’s model, which seems to prioritize mostly verified videos from channels such as the Mayo Clinic and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, does a better job.
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