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A24 TECHNOLOGY
Saturday 6 april 2019

Vaccine wars: Social media battle outbreak of bogus claims

By BARBARA ORTUTAY viruses they are trying to
AP Technology Writer prevent, or that the natu-
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — ral immunity conferred by
Like health officials facing catching a disease is better
outbreaks of disease, inter- than vaccines.
net companies are trying In truth, fear and suspicion
to contain vaccine-related of vaccines have been
misinformation they have around as long as vaccines
long helped spread. So far, have existed. Smallpox in-
their efforts at quarantine oculations caused a furor
are falling short. in colonial New England
Searches of Facebook, in the 1700s. And anti-vac-
Pinterest and Instagram cine agitation existed on-
turn up all sorts of bogus line long before Facebook
warnings about vaccines, and Twitter.
including the soundly de- Still, experts in online mis-
bunked notions that they information say social net-
cause autism or that mer- working and the way its
cury preservatives and algorithms disseminate the
other substances in them most “engaging” posts —
can poison and even kill whether true or not — have
people. fueled the spread of anti-
Some experts fear that the vaccination propaganda
online spread of bad infor- In this March 27, 2019, file photo, measles, mumps and rubella vaccines sit in a cooler at the and pushed parents into
mation about vaccines is Rockland County Health Department in Pomona, N.Y. the anti-vax camp.
planting or reinforcing fears Associated Press Jeanine Guidry, a professor
in parents, and they sus- bogus vaccine information things, a post titled “Why come up on a search of at Virginia Commonwealth
pect it is contributing to the online is one more front in We Said NO to the Measles “vaccine safety.” A search University who studies so-
comeback in recent years the battle by social media Vaccine,” along with a sin- of “vaccine,” meanwhile, cial media and vaccines,
of certain dangerous child- to deal with fake news of ister-looking illustration of a turns up the verified profile said social media amplifies
hood diseases, including all sorts, including political hand holding an enormous of Dr. Christiane Northrup, a these conversations and
measles, whooping cough propaganda. (Researchers needle titled “Vaccine-na- physician who is outspoken creates echo chambers
and mumps. have even found Russia- tion: poisoning the popula- in her misgivings about — that can reinforce bad
“The online world has been linked bots trying to sow tion one shot at a time.” and at times opposition to information.q
one that has been very discord by amplifying both Facebook, meanwhile, said — vaccines. Carpiano said it is difficult
much taken over by misin- sides of the vaccine de- in March that it would no On Facebook’s Instagram, to document the actual ef-
formation spread by con- bate.) longer recommend groups hashtags such as “vac- fect social media has had
cerned parents,” said Rich- Pinterest, the digital scrap- and pages that spread cineskill” and accounts on vaccination rates, but
ard Carpiano, a professor of booking and search site hoaxes about vaccines, against vaccinating chil- “we do see decrease in
public policy and sociology that has been a leading and that it would reject ads dren are easily found with coverage and rise in gaps
at the University of Califor- online repository of vaccine that do this. This appears to a simple search for “vac- of coverage,” as well as
nia, Riverside, who studies misinformation, took the have filtered out some of cines.” clusters of vaccine-hesitant
vaccine trends. “Medical seemingly drastic step in the most blatant sources The discredited ideas circu- people.
doctors don’t command 2017 of blocking all search- of vaccine misinformation, lating online include the be- Despite high-profile out-
the sort of authority they es for the term “vaccines.” such as the website Natu- lief that the recommended breaks , overall vaccina-
did decades ago. There is But it’s been a leaky quar- ralnews.com. number of shots for babies tion rates remain high in the
a lack of confidence in in- antine. Recently, a search But even after the chang- is too much for their bodies U.S., according to the Cen-
stitutions people had faith for “measles vaccine” still es, anti-vax groups were to handle, that vaccines in- ters for Disease Control and
in.”The effort to screen out brought up, among other among the first results to fect people with the same Prevention. q

Snap joins online game fray,

unveils advertising products

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Snapchat is join- In addition, Snapchat launched original
ing the online-games bandwagon with a shows that can only be watched on its
new service that lets people play together service, including “Can’t Talk Now,” which
on its mobile platform. follows a group of high school kids with the
The company says it wants to make it eas- story told through their phones.
ier for friends to play together. Snap joins Google and Apple in launching
Snap Inc. also unveiled at Los Angeles a gaming platform in the hopes of attract-
event Thursday new products to help ing new users — or at least keeping exist-
companies advertise on its service, includ- ing ones coming back instead of leaving
ing Snapchat Ad Kit and Snapchat Audi- for the wildly popular Fortnite game.
ence Network. Snap has been struggling with declining
The tools let businesses send ads both to user numbers and stiff competition from
Snapchat users and people who don’t use Facebook’s Instagram.
the service, within other apps. The setup is It had 186 million daily active users in the
This Aug. 9, 2017, file photo shows the Snapchat app on a mobile
device in New York. similar to what Facebook does with its own last quarter of 2018, compared with 187
Associated Press ad service. million in the third quarter.q