AP — Concerned about the number of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients arriving at his hospital, the French doctor logged into Facebook and posted a video urging others to get vaccinated.
It temporarily invaded through dozens, then hundreds, then more than 1,000 hate messages from an extremist anti-vaccine organization known as V_V. The organization, active in France and Italy, has harassed doctors and public fitness officials, vandalized government offices and attempted to disrupt vaccination clinics.
Alarmed by the abuses of its platform, Facebook introduced several accounts connected to the organization last December. But that hasn’t stopped V_V, which continues to use Facebook and other platforms and, like many anti-vaccine teams around the world, has expanded its portfolio to come with climate replacing denial and anti-democratic messages.
“We’re going to pick them up home, they don’t want to sleep anymore,” reads a post from the group. “Fight with us!” reads another.
The largely out-of-control nature of attacks on the vaccine’s undeniable fitness benefits highlights the apparent limitations of a social media company in countering even the most destructive kind of misinformation, especially without a sustained competitive effort.
Researchers at Reset, a UK-based nonprofit, learned of more than 15,000 Facebook posts that were abusive or loaded with incorrect V_V information, activity that peaked in the spring of 2022, months after the platform announced its moves opposed to the organization. In a report on V_V’s activities, Reset researchers concluded that their continued presence on Facebook raises “questions about the effectiveness and consistency of Meta’s self-reported intervention. “
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, noted in reaction that its 2021 moves were never intended to remove all of V_V’s content, but instead to remove accounts that engaged in coordinated harassment. After the Associated Press tipped Facebook off about the group’s continued activities on its platform, it said it got rid of another 100 accounts this week.
Meta said it seeks to find a balance between content from teams like V_V that obviously violate anti-harassment rules or harmful misinformation, without silencing innocent users. This can be especially challenging when it comes to the debatable factor of vaccines.
“This is a highly contentious area and our efforts continue: Since our initial withdrawal, we have taken many steps against attempts to return to this network,” a Meta spokesperson told the AP.
V_V is also active on Twitter, where Reset researchers have uncovered many accounts and thousands of posts from the group. Many accounts were created some time after Facebook took action on the program last winter, Reset found.
Reacting to reset’s report, Twitter said it had cracked down on several accounts connected to V_V, but did not detail the actions.
V_V has resisted efforts to prevent it. Nominated for the film “V for Vendetta,” in which a lonely, masked guy seeks revenge on an authoritarian government, the organization uses fake accounts to evade detection and coordinates its messages and activities on platforms like Telegram that lack Facebook’s moderation policies.
This adaptability is one of the reasons it has been difficult to stop the group, according to Jack Stubbs, a researcher at Graphika, a data analytics firm that has tracked V_V’s activities.
“They perceive how it works,” Stubbs said.
Graphika estimated that the organization had 20,000 members as of the end of 2021, with a smaller core of members involved in its online harassment efforts. In addition to Italy and France, Graphika’s team uncovered evidence that V_V is looking to create chapters in Spain, the United States. United Kingdom, Ireland, Brazil and Germany, where an anti-government motion known as Querdenken is active.
Groups and movements such as V_V and Querdenken have increasingly alarmed extremism researchers and law enforcement who say there is evidence that far-right teams are skeptical about COVID-19 and vaccines to expand their reach.
Increasingly, those teams are moving from online harassment to real-world action.
For example, in April, V_V used Telegram to announce plans to pay a €10,000 bonus to vandals who spray-painted the organization’s public buildings or vaccination clinics (two red V’s in a circle). The organization then used Telegram to transmit images of the vandalism.
A month before Facebook intervened in V_V, Italian police raided the homes of 17 anti-vaccine activists who had used Telegram to threaten government, medical and media figures over their alleged COVID-19 restrictions.
Social media corporations have struggled to respond to a wave of incorrect information about vaccines since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this week, Facebook and Instagram suspended Children’s Health Defense, an influential anti-vaccine organization led by Robert Kennedy Jr.
One explanation for why it’s the delicate balance between moderating destructive content and protecting loose speech, according to Joshua Tucker of New York University, who co-directs New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics and is a senior adviser to Kroll, a technology, government and economics company. . consulting company.
Finding the right balance is especially important, as social media has a key source of news and data around the world. Leave too much bad content and users may be misinformed. If you delete too much, users will start to distrust the platform.
“It’s harmful to society that we’re moving in a direction that no one thinks they can accept as true with information,” Tucker said.
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