The battle to stop the spread of vaccine misinformation online

The rollout of coronavirus vaccines has presented new challenges to social media websites and groups fighting online misinformation.

When the United States and a handful of other countries began rolling out coronavirus vaccines late last year, a film propagating falsehoods about the coronavirus outbreak was racking up millions of views online. The unsubstantiated claims in the “Planet Lockdown” video include debunked theories that the coronavirus vaccines will modify a person’s DNA, cause infertility and contain microchips to track human beings. The film received at least 20 million combined views or engagements across social media sites before Facebook and YouTube banned it from their platforms. The video was reminiscent of a 26-minute documentary titled “Plandemic” that went viral last year. It made baseless and widely refuted claims about the coronavirus outbreak, including that billionaires had helped spread COIVD-19 to increase vaccine use. The film had 1.8 million views and some 17,000 comments by the time Facebook took it down.