16 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
CRITIC AT LARGEMODIFIED FROM © ISTOCK.COM, VISUAL GENERATIONI
n 2020, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus raised an alarm bell about scientific
misinformation circulating online. “We’re not just battling the
virus,” he said in a February 8, 2020, media briefing. “We’re also
battling the trolls and conspiracy theorists that push misinfor-
mation and undermine the outbreak response.” A week later, in a
speech at the Munich Security Conference, Tedros put it in terms
that went viral on Twitter: “We’re not just fighting an epidemic,
we’re fighting an infodemic.”
Although Tedros was speaking nearly a year before COVID-
vaccines would become available to the general public, his comments
were prescient. The anti-vaccine movement online is currently one of
the largest threats to global health, especially in the face of the linger-
ing pandemic. Anti-vaccine supporters share incorrect and misin-
formed views about the COVID-19 shots and other vaccines claiming
they are harmful, cause autism, or can be used as tools of population
control. This movement was lively and growing before the pandemic,
but it has been gaining momentum since vaccines have become the
most promising tools to control COVID-19.
In this historical time, many people are hesitant about vac-
cines. It is therefore of utmost importance that they can access
trustworthy sources of information without getting misled by
unfounded anti-vaccine discourse and rhetoric, which is often
encountered on social media. Specific strategies to tackle the anti-
vaccine infodemic are lacking, and new approaches need to be
identified, especially with regard to social media.
In a study published in PLOS ONE last year, we analyzed
the behavior of anti-vaccine supporters on Twitter. We found
that the anti-vaccine community is made up of many profiles
that share content produced by a few influencers with large
numbers of followers. Results show that, before his Twitter
profile was suspended, former US President Donald Trump
was the main anti-vaccine influencer: while he did not share
anti-vaccine content himself, his tweets were widely shared
by the anti-vaccine community. Other influencers include his
son Donald Trump Jr. and public figures supportive of Trump’s
presidency, including actor and producer James Wood and
conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Influencers can also play a positive role in fighting misinfor-
mation. Given the relevance of actors, athletes, and other celeb-
rities, health organizations such as the WHO should consider
lobbying highly followed influencers to share positive messages
about vaccines, highlighting their efficacy and safety when these
attributes have been demonstrated in clinical trials and supportedby pharmacovigilance monitoring, as they have in the case of sev-
eral COVID-19 vaccines.
Following Trump’s suspension from Twitter, it may be tempting
to think that censoring anti-vaccine influencers would be another
viable strategy to halt the infodemic. However, individuals, organi-
zations, or corporations may take advantage of censorship to silence
dissidents or make profits. Social media companies in particular,
because they are private corporations with their own commercial
interests, should not become the arbiters of free speech.
Short of banning spreaders of misinformation, some have
proposed that we rely on artificial intelligence to stem the tide
of false news. Unfortunately, developing algorithms to precisely
spot and weed out misinformation may take a long time or may
even be impossible. Therefore, we propose that focusing on
training consumers’ skills and improving their understanding
of digital information should become an absolute priority.
One possible intervention in this vein—albeit one that would
raise ethical issues that need to be discussed first—is the introduc-
tion of basic tests of critical thinking skills for social media usersCan requiring users of Facebook and other platforms to pass critical
thinking tests stem the tide of widely disseminated misinformation?BY FEDERICO GERMANI AND NIKOLA BILLER-ANDORNOInjecting Truth into Social Media