UK to pressure social media companies to fight anti-vax info

Associated Press

LONDON

Britain’s government plans to call a summit of social media companies to discuss what more they can do to fight online misinformation about vaccines following a spike in measles cases.

Although plans for such a gathering were still being worked out, Prime Minister Boris Johnson expressed concern Monday at the rising incidence of measles. He said Britain had a great record in fighting the disease but things were suddenly “going in the wrong direction,” with 230 new measles cases in the first few months of this year.

He said authorities need to address misleading information online about vaccinations.

“I’m afraid people have been listening to that superstitious mumbo jumbo on the internet, all that anti-vax stuff and thinking that the MMR vaccine is a bad idea,” Johnson said while visiting a hospital in southwestern England. “That’s wrong.”

Social media companies have struggled to combat fake news of all sorts, from political propaganda to bogus warnings about vaccines such as MMR for measles, mumps, and rubella.

Though anti-vaccine sentiments have been around for as long as vaccines have existed, health experts worry that anti-vaccine propaganda can spread more quickly on social media. That can push parents who are worried about vaccines toward refusing to inoculate their children against various diseases, leading to their comeback.

Pinterest, a leading online repository of vaccine misinformation, took the seemingly drastic step in 2017 of blocking all searches for the term “vaccines.” Facebook, meanwhile, said in March that it would no longer recommend groups and pages that spread hoaxes about vaccines and that it would reject ads that do this.

But anti-vax information still slips through. That includes soundly debunked notions that vaccines cause autism or that mercury preservatives and other substances in them can harm people.