Bladewire

Who knew? So pathetic putin's russians targeting pregnant women in the hopes their children will die from their efforts.

Russian troll "anti-vaxxers" use Facebook to target vulnerable pregnant women

Facebook enables advertisers to promote content to nearly 900,000 people interested in “vaccine controversies”, the Guardian has found.

Other groups of people that advertisers can pay to reach on Facebook include those interested in “Dr Tenpenny on Vaccines”, which refers to anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny, and “informed consent”, which is language that anti-vaccine propagandists have adopted to fight vaccination laws.

Facebook’s self-serve advertising platform allows users to pay to promote posts to finely tuned subsets of its 2.3 billion users, based on thousands of characteristics, including age, location, gender, occupation and interests. In some cases, users self-identify their interests, but in other cases, Facebook creates categories based on users’ online activity. In 2017, after a controversy involving antisemitic interest categories, Facebook vowed to build “new guardrails” on its targeting categories.

Facebook is already facing pressure to stop promoting anti-vaccine propaganda to users amid global concern over vaccine hesitancy and a measles outbreak in the Pacific north-west.

On Thursday, California congressman Adam Schiff, the chair of the House intelligence committee, cited the Guardian’s reporting on anti-vaccine propaganda on Facebook and YouTube in letters to Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai urging them to take more responsibility for health-related misinformation on their platforms.

“The algorithms which power these services are not designed to distinguish quality information from misinformation or misleading information, and the consequences of that are particularly troubling for public health issues,” Schiff wrote.

“I am concerned by the report that Facebook accepts paid advertising that contains deliberate misinformation about vaccines,” he added.

Facebook’s ad-targeting tools are highly valued by businesses because they enable, for example, a pet supply store in Ohio to show its advertising exclusively to pet owners in Ohio. But the tools have also spurred controversy.

A Russian influence operation took advantage of the self-service platform to promote divisive content during the 2016 US presidential election. In 2017, ProPublica revealed that the platform included targeting categories for people interested in a number of antisemitic phrases, such as “How to burn Jews” or “Jew hater”.

While the antisemitic categories found by ProPublica were automatically generated and were too small to run effective ad campaigns by themselves, the “vaccine controversies” category contains nearly 900,000 people, and “informed consent” about 340,000. The Tenpenny category only includes 720 people, which is too few to run a campaign.

Following the ProPublica report, Facebook removed many automatically generated targeting categories and said it was “building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future.”


How Facebook and YouTube help spread anti-vaxxer propaganda
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Facebook declined to comment on the ad targeting categories, but said it was looking into the issue.

“We’ve taken steps to reduce the distribution of health-related misinformation on Facebook, but we know we have more to do,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement responding to Schiff’s letter. “We’re currently working on additional changes that we’ll be announcing soon.”

The changes under consideration include removing anti-vaccine misinformation from recommendations and demoting it in search results, the spokesperson said. The steps they have already taken include having third-party fact-checkers review health-related articles.

A YouTube spokesperson also declined to comment on Schiff’s letter, but noted the company’s recent changes to its recommendation algorithm to reduce the spread of misinformation, including some anti-vaccine videos.

“We’ve done a number of things within this realm,” the spokesperson said. “But these are still early days. And our systems will get better and more accurate.”

Competing echo chambers
In the past, Facebook has suggested that simply censoring anti-vaccine propaganda might be less effective than counter-speech providing accurate information.

But a pro-vaccination activist whose non-profit organization, Voices for Vaccines, uses Facebook to promote positive messages about vaccination to parents, questioned the efficacy of counter-speech on the topic.

“I’m not interested in promoting the idea that vaccines are controversial,” said Karen Ernst, who runs Voices for Vaccines from her home in St Paul, Minnesota, and budgets from $50 to $100 each month to advertise pro-vaccine content on Facebook.

Ernst said that she was well-aware of the “vaccine controversies” interest category, but never uses it. Targeting people who see vaccines as controversial “gets toward making social media a place where vaccines are fought over, which feels really counterproductive to public health,” she said. “It’s making the echo chamber more echo-y.”

Ernst said that while she believes Facebook advertising can be an effective means of promoting vaccination, she feels outgunned by anti-vaxxers. Many of her advertisements have been rejected because she has not registered as a political advertiser, she said, in part out of concern that Facebook’s new transparency tools for political advertising will make her a target for harassment from anti-vaxxers. (The tools would identify Ernst as having paid to promote the posts, and maintain an archive of her ads.)

Larry Cook, a Californian who runs an anti-vaccine Facebook group with more than 150,000 members, has raised more than $7,700 on GoFundMe to fund anti-vaccine misinformation Facebook advertisements since 29 January. Cook has raised nearly $80,000 total on GoFundMe for anti-vaccine promotion since 2015. On GoFundMe, he claims that he has spent more than $35,000 on Facebook advertising over four years.

Cook’s advertisements have been censured by the UK advertising regulator, the Advertising Standards Authority, but continue to run in the US, where he is currently focused on targeting mothers in Washington state – the site of a current measles outbreak.

Ernst said one way Facebook could help combat anti-vaccine propaganda would be to provide free advertising to public health organizations promoting sound medical advice.

Schiff first introduced a House resolution declaring “unequivocal congressional support for vaccines” in 2015. He told the Guardian by phone that he plans to introduce a similar resolution again this year, but that he may update it to feature “the role that these social media companies are playing in the propagation of this bad information”.

“It’s difficult to understand why, when this problem has been raised, why either company would take advertising dollars to promote dangerous and misleading information,” he said. “I think our chances of passage are far better than they have been in the past, and tragically that’s because we’ve seen the problem just grow and grow.”

Bladewire

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just a punk

I didn't read the article, but doing vaccines while pregnant is a very-very bad idea. I don't want to say that vaccines and antibiotics are evil. Course they are not, but not for pregnant women, people with weaken immune system etc.

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Bladewire

Your people were prepping vulnerable pregnant mother's not to vaccinate their precious babies after birth.

What do russians like you have to say about this bro?

It seems like pootshits way is kill as many American children as you can by any means.

wehateporn

British Medical Journal - Flu vaccines for pregnant women increased the risk of spontaneous abortion by 7.7 times

https://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k15

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just a punk

Nothing new about it.

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beerptrol

Russian troll "anti-vaxxers" use Facebook to target vulnerable pregnant women

and the low IQ ones target GFY

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Phoenix

flu shots aside...anyone who refuses the standard vaccines should be exiled, unless it is prescribed by an actual doctor. Not Jenny who sells crystals and essential oils.

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pimpmaster9000

just a reminder that russia is responsible for everything possible because: ruissia....the honest honest US government that murders 500.000 over lies is super honest and shit...honestly stamp of approval over 9000...bad bad russia doing everything evil tho...its all pooty...USA is the cradle of innocence

what a fucking joke

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klinton

its obvious.
BTW. I know parents that got their 4 ? 6 ? years old kid getting actually autism after some "cocktail" of vaccines, few vaccines done in one time.
So while I'm absolutely not anti vaccine (excerpt stupidities like vaccines for flu), I think that moderation is a key everywhere.
btw2. I dont do antibiotics at all. I did them ONE time in last 20 years, cause of some shitty (literally...) tropical stomach bacteria. I consider antibiotics as evil (unless REALLY needed), and I think that this is where the real danger is.

klinton

wehateporn

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Bladewire

So true!

GFY has been assigned the laziest most inept alt-right hate fake nic troll that can be spotted so easily

He'll post right after me in 3.. 2... 1...

wehateporn

Jenny is warning people about what vaccines did to her child, she's doing the decent thing, especially as she knows a powerful industry will smear her for trying to get the warning out.

You can't blame people for not trusting Pharma, Big Pharma have a horrendous reputation and they get to profit from any harm their vaccines cause, a gross conflict of interest.

As long as they continue to refuse to allow their products to face scientific scrutiny, this situation will not change.

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wehateporn

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just a punk

Yes, the flu vaccine is a joke. Millions of people here do it every year and almost every cold winter they get sick of the flu virus.

You may like it or not, but in many potentially deadly cases, antibiotics are the only way to survive. E.g. general bacterial blood poisoning, pneumonia, gangrene, plague, anthrax, syphilis, typhoid, salmonellosis, dysentery, cholera etc.

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pimpmaster9000

willful blindness from the anti vaxxers about the huge benefits of vaccines that far far outweigh the side effects...

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just a punk

Benefits of anti-flu vaccine? Can you name at least one? How could something be beneficial if it just doesn't work?

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wehateporn

If pharma can prove that, all good, but so far they are refusing any high quality studies, seems they don’t have confidence in their products

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Bladewire

Well if your premise is that everyone that gets an anti-flu vaccine gets the flu, there's really no place to go from there. It's a non starter.

just a punk

Not everyone. Some people could be resistant for it due to their immunity. On the other hand, I haven't noticed any difference between the % of people who catches the flu regardless if they are vaccinated or not. As I said above, we have very cold winter here, so Russia is a good polygon to test anti-flu vaccines for their efficiency.

I'm not an anti-vaccine adept and I know that some vaccines are very effective and essential for a whole humanity. E.g. anti-polio, anti-smallpox etc, but the anti-flu one is not among those. Just because there is a countless number of various flu strains and every one needs its own vaccine.

Flu is like a canine distemper. So here is just a example. My dog was not vaccinated and a dog of my neighbors was. They both were the same breed (German Shepherd) and of the same age (about 1 year old). So my dog has survived, while the vaccinated one has died. How come?

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Bladewire

Canine distemper is different than canine influenza and they are both different than the parainfluenza virus and all three have separate vaccines.

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just a punk

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Bladewire

↑↑↑ Truth

Russian controlled alt-right hate fake nic troll will post propoganda in 3.. 2.. 1...

wehateporn

Bladewire, you could do with looking up Dunning-Kruger, it is relevant to you on the topic of vaccination, you are at that high confidence bit at the start

King Mark

Russia is just taking advantage of America's stupidity. Most people here are party puppets and will do anything to be accepted into the "team", hence Russia using the internet to divide and conquer us.

wehateporn

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