Detaining Disinformation: a public health necessity or a threat to free speech?

Believe it or not, the anti-vaccine movement pre-dates Coronavirus and social media for that matter. Yet in today’s climate, it’s hard to picture the anti-vaccine movement meaning anything other than frantic Facebook comments on the community group you reluctantly joined, or yet another retweet of an extravagant 5G conspiracy.

It’s true that in recent months anti-vaxxing has spread as fast as another pandemic we know. The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) recently published a report that revealed that anti-vaxx social media accounts have increased their following by 7.8 million people since last year alone. The movement’s influence is only growing: 31 million people are now following anti-vax Facebook groups and 17 million are subscribed to related accounts on YouTube.

Moderna and the 12 vaccines in waiting

The announcement of a 95% effective Coronavirus vaccine was difficult to miss last week especially since it was splashed across front pages all over the world. And for the UK, it was news that could not have come at a better time with England under the dark cloud of a second lockdown paired with tighter restrictions announced for the central and west of Scotland this week, and Northern Ireland’s “circuit-break” lockdown evolving into a partial lockdown that feels like it will never end.

Moderna’s vaccine has joined 12 others, including one developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, that recorded a similar success rate in the same week. These results have been the long-anticipated good news that 2020 needed. They present the first sign that the tide is turning on Coronavirus, finally.

Well at least for some of us.

The anti-vaxxer Club

A potential vaccine is, of course, not good news to everyone. To the anti-vaxx movement, it is the most recent and serious development of the government’s attempt to control us. Within hours of the Pfizer and BioNTech announcement, disinformation about the virus was spreading across Facebook walls and comment sections. Conspiracies quickly stretched across platforms, speculating anything and everything from vaccinations being simply a ruse to microchip us, to track our movements, to alter our DNA, and to even being a mass-produced weapon that would enact a genocide.

Of course, that is the extreme of the extreme – the very edge of an already fringe opinion.

The anti-vaxxer club doesn’t just stop there however. In fact, the CCDH has identified four distinct groups of anti-vaxxers. Conspiracy theorists are only one category. We also have to consider community groups with a limited but ardent following and the full-time campaigners who make it their life’s mission to “ferment distrust in vaccines”. Not to mention the entrepreneurs that take full advantage of social media as a “shop front for anti-vaxx products” to target a sympathetic audience.

In other words, the anti-vaxxer club is no longer just a fringe movement banished to society’s sidelines. It is a movement that is edging its way closer into the mainstream, feeding off the fear and uncertainty that Coronavirus breeds.

According to a survey conducted by the Reuter’s Institute for the Study of Journalism, a third of respondents from the six-country study reported that they had seen “a lot or a great deal of false or misleading” information about COVID-19 in only a week. Social media is not just a shop front but a megaphone that makes the anti-vaxx movement more dangerous than ever.

Taking Away the Megaphone

Social Media platforms did attempt to take the megaphone away from anti-vaxxers spreading fake news before the Coronavirus pandemic. As recent as last year, Facebook announced that they would not recommend content that contained “misinformation on vaccines” but would also not remove the content entirely. YouTube removed advertising from anti-vaxx videos which would dry up the movement’s funding and Twitter pledged that when its users searched for vaccine-related issues, the first result would be a reliable source which in the case of the UK would be the National Health Service (NHS).

But how effective are these steps when the CCDH’s ‘Failure to Act’ report exposed that only 20 out of 912 posts that displayed disinformation about COVID-19 were handled by social media platforms? Do these measures go far enough when the Shadow Health Secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, has equated sharing COVID-19 disinformation to “exploiting people’s fears and augmenting their mistrust of institutions and governments in spreading poison and harm”?

Mr Ashworth has called for a cross-party approach to tackling disinformation in light of the recent vaccine announcements to ensure that there is widespread public confidence when the 20 million doses become available following approval from the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

For the Good of Public Health

Health Secretary Matt Hancock, along with Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden, have already begun escalating the clampdown on disinformation on social media platforms. Last week, the UK government announced a social media package  that would prevent platforms from profiting of anti-vaxx content as well as commit to a “timely response” for false posts to be flagged and/or removed.

While holding social media platforms accountable for the content on their sites has been considered a victory by many, it has divided its critics. In one camp, “the good of public health” argument would argue that criminalisation and the prosecution of anti-vaxxers is the only way to stop the spread of disinformation in its tracks. This follows a report published by the British Academy and Royal Society that suggested that for a Coronavirus vaccine to be successful, it needed to have an 80% uptake. Anything less, any falter in public trust, would mean that disinformation had compromised the entire COVID-19 response effort. The report, published by Oxford Professor Melinda Mills MBE, recommended making it illegal to spread vaccine disinformation for the good of public health.

Legislation that could be imminent with the Labour Party will place pressure on the government to introduce financial and criminal punishments on social media platforms that fail to address the disinformation content on their sites following the introduction of the government’s new package.

What happens when only one side gets the megaphone?

While there are many that think the new measures do not go far enough and that legal ramifications are a necessary evil to protect public health, there are a growing number of people that would argue that the action taken already goes too far and any more would threaten our right to free speech.

Article 10 of the 1998 Human Rights Act, among other international human rights conventions, enshrines our fundamental right to freedom of expression in all forms including all social media. Notably, this includes freedom from government intervention.

Even before the Coronavirus pandemic, restriction of free speech, especially for anti-vaxxers, was an unpopular one. The Spectator branded any censorship of anti-vaxxers as “absurdity”, noting it as a “staggering suggestion” that demonstrated “a complete lack of understanding of the principles of free speech-let alone the likely effect of such censorship”. In other words, the more you order someone not to do something and strip them of their free will to question your orders, the more they will rebel against you – it’s human nature to be free.

The beauty of free speech is that it protects all speech and opinions, even including the ones we do not agree with. Both sides are meant to get the megaphone. This explains why the new measures, including the social media package, has come under fire from the likes of Professor Vish Viswanath of Health Communication in the Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health.

Professor Viswanath argued that “de-platforming” anti-vaxx social media posts is a slippery slope that paves the way for further restrictions on free speech to be justified. Punishing anti-vaxxers with financial penalties and even jail time may threaten their right to free speech but it may also weaken Article 10 for the rest of us, rendering it that much flimsier when we, or future generations, go to use it.

So, what is the solution?

Whether legal punishments will come to fruition for spreading disinformation online, who is to say. The only solution that we control is to fight disinformation with information.  You control the accounts you follow, the tweets you share, and the articles you read. The best weapon against Coronavirus is a vaccine and the best ammunition against fake news? The truth.

 

Written by Rebecca Carey

All Featured Images courtesy of United Nations COVID-19 response via Unsplash. No changes were made to the images. Image Licence can be found here.