According to a new U.S. study, social media bots and Russian trolls have been sowing discord and spreading false information about vaccines on Twitter.
David Broniatowski, an assistant professor at George Washington University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, co-authored the study, which is titled “Weaponized Health Communication” and was published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health.
“We have a lot of accounts, a lot of actors that are out there that are perhaps masquerading as human users that in fact may not be human users. Or if they are human, they have different agendas,” Broniatowski explained in an interview with CTV News.
“We do have evidence of a foreign power that seems to be using the vaccine discourse and creating a vaccine debate in order to advance their own agenda, whatever that agenda may be.”
By examining thousands of vaccine-related tweets sent between July 2014 and Sept. 2017, the research team identified several Twitter accounts that are now known to be tied to the Internet Research Agency: a Russian government-linked company that has been accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. election. Malware and marketing bots, they also found, shared anti-vaccination messages 75 per cent more often than average Twitter users.
“When we see actors such as these Russian trolls or such as bots, which are automated accounts that can spread spam and malware and other sort of unsavory content, they may simply be using vaccines as a way to get people’s attention, as a way to get people to fight one another, as a way to get them to click on a link,” Broniatowski said.
“Unfortunately, this does have some very concerning side effects because one of the things that we know from prior research is that exposure to the vaccine debate leads people to be hesitant, not to trust their physician’s recommendations and it may drive down vaccination rates, it may increase the likelihood of epidemics.”
Such misinformation campaigns in the U.S., Broniatowski adds, also put Canadians at risk.
“Viruses do not respect national boundaries and so if we get an epidemic, that epidemic… is not going to stay just within one country,” he said.
“Twitter messages are also not restricted to national borders,” Broniatowski added. “Therefore it stands to reason that Canadian viewers that see these messages may also get misconceptions about vaccines and so it really does put the Canadian population at risk just as much as the U.S. population.”
