fact finder
Status: December 21, 2021 6:31 a.m.
Fake news about Covid-19 is widespread. A study shows how an international network of medical professionals became super spreaders of disinformation – and how Facebook’s measures against it came to nothing.
Disinformation about the corona pandemic has been spread en masse in recent months – and has long since not only appeared on dubious Telegram channels. Recently, statements by the cabaret artist Lisa Fitz caused a sensation, which in the SWR had claimed that there have been more than 5000 vaccine deaths in the EU so far. The “taz” reported on this first false assertion of fact, the SWR later took the show from the media library and admitted an error.
Claims like Fitz’s are to be found again and again in a similar form – for example on the Russian state broadcaster RT DE. Numbers on suspected cases of side effects are misused as supposed evidence of the dangerousness of the vaccines, and uncertainty is deliberately fueled. Networks, which often include celebrities or medical professionals, play a central role in spreading such claims.
International network
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has scrutinized such an international network. The ITS, based in London and Berlin, regularly presents in-depth analyzes of disinformation; The current report is about the “World Doctors Alliance” (WDA). It is an association of medical professionals from the USA, Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, among others.
The German ISD analysis lies tagesschau.de in advance; the report documents how the members of the “World Doctors Alliance” were able to develop into superspreaders of disinformation. Specifically, data evaluations show the immense reach the WDA was able to achieve on Facebook – and how Facebook failed to significantly limit the content.
Immense increase
Despite repeated misleading claims, members of the WDA more than doubled their average number of interactions on Facebook in the first six months of 2021.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the “World Doctors Alliance” on Facebook only had 3456 users who followed their page. In mid-2021, according to ISD, there were then seven Facebook pages that belonged to the network – with more than 460,000 users who followed them. This corresponds to an increase of 13,215 percent.
Targeted scare tactics
According to the ITS, this increase is mainly due to the two most prominent members of the group: Dr. Dolores Cahill, former professor at University College Dublin, and Dr. Scott Jensen, a former Senator from Minnesota.
For example, Cahill, who chaired the right-wing Irish Freedom Party, had claimed that vaccinations could trigger a deadly cytokine storm, for which there was no evidence. Cahill also claimed that masks and distance rules were unnecessary as Covid-19 could be treated with “diet, vitamins and hydroxychloroquine”.
British members of the group also include Dr. Mohammad Adil, who claimed that Covid-19 was a global hoax by an elite, to control the world. To this day, Adil is the administrator of the WDA’s private Facebook group, which has 1,600 members.
A former AfD member of the state parliament from Germany belongs to the “World Doctors Alliance” and has appeared several times at “lateral thinkers” demonstrations. The doctor described proponents of Covid vaccinations as “a disciple of Josef Mengeles”. Another German doctor from the network supports other organizations from the anti-vaccination milieu – such as the “Doctors for Enlightenment”, according to the ISD.
Serious flaws
In their investigation, the ISD analysts found serious shortcomings in Facebook’s fact-checking program – particularly with regard to content that was not published in English.
A review of the 50 most popular posts that mentioned the World Doctors Alliance showed that only 13 percent of English-language posts that contained false or misleading content had a factcheck label. In other languages the proportion was even lower: eight percent of the German contributions, five percent of the Spanish and only two percent of the Arabic contributions.
ISD: “Facebook fails”
The ISD comes to the conclusion that Facebook fails “in the vast majority of cases” because of the labeling of the posts classified as incorrect by its own fact-checking partners. The effectiveness of Facebook’s fact-checking program must be re-examined in terms of preventing or restricting the spread of false information.
Since providers of disinformation produced content in large quantities, it is almost impossible for fact checkers to debunk allegations or contributions individually, the analysis says. Therefore, stronger action should be taken against the originators of misinformation.
The challenge is compounded as the same claims, or slight variations thereof, are repeated endlessly elsewhere and in other languages. Facebook claims to be able to recognize such very similar postings through programs, but in practice this often does not seem to work. According to the ISD, the investigation shows that Facebook fails to uncover duplicates and variations of false claims.
“Not representative”
A spokeswoman for the Facebook parent company Meta shared when asked by tagesschau.de with that the analysis is only a small sample of 14 accounts, sites or groups, including the main organization “World Freedom Alliance”, which was removed in July.
This sample is “in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts people have shared on Facebook about Covid-19 vaccines in the past few months.”
“Systematic Problem”
Helena Schwertheim from the ISD in Berlin explained in an interview with tagesschau.de, The analysis shows how networks like the WDA “are spreading their fatal message – in this case via Facebook – and how the platform fails to fulfill its duty to ban and remove false claims about Covid-19”. Schwertheim emphasized that “one should not underestimate the real offline damage that medical disinformation can cause in these times”.
Regarding the online platforms, she said it was “clearly a systematic problem”. Not enough is being done to protect the well-being of users – offline and online.