Of Bots and Trolls – DrChet.com

Have you heard any of these about vaccinations on social media or the Internet?

“Big Pharma only wants vaccine profits.”

“Natural immunity is better.”

“Vaccines cause autism.”

If you’ve read those articles, they seem to be full of truth about vaccinations, don’t they? Did you ever get into a conversation with someone who posted these types of articles? How did it go—especially if you disagreed with them?

Would you be surprised to learn it might not even have been a human doing the answering? It may have been bots or if actual humans, trolls.

Bots are social media accounts that automate content promotion. Trolls are people who misrepresent their identity and post inflammatory remarks with the express purpose of creating discord. The idea is to amplify the arguments to fever pitch so people end up angry at each other. They draw in friends and relatives to get them at each other’s throats with false narratives about health. You could use the same approach with cancer treatment or cholesterol levels.

Researchers at the George Washington University examined Twitter posts between July 2014 and September 2017 and did a computer search of close to two million tweets about vaccines and vaccinations. The most stunning revelation, at least to me, was that 9.3% of all tweets were sent by accounts that could not be verified as automated bots or trolls, yet exhibited malicious behavior by spreading misinformation about vaccines.

We’ll continue this on Thursday.

What are you prepared to do today?