Miles Parks, NPR ; The Most Popular J&J Vaccine Story On Facebook? A Conspiracy Theorist Posted It
""This is what I would call the perfect storm for misinformation," said Jennifer Granston at Zignal Labs, a media intelligence platform...
In most cases, the social media companies say they can't do much to respond in cases such as this, since people largely are sharing articles based on factual information, even if the commentary and subtext around the posting is meant to further false ideas.
"It's a really insidious problem," said Deen Freelon, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in an interview with NPR last month. "The social media companies have taken a hard line against disinformation; they have not taken a similarly hard line against fallacies."
Many anti-vaccine activists have adopted this tactic as a way of getting around social media networks' policies designed to halt the spread of false information....
Often, misinformation peddlers with a specific agenda will fill in
knowledge gaps with false information, knowing people are desperate for
any information at all."
