Abbas Panjwani, an intelligence analyst at Full Fact, says it is too early to understand how much online misinformation fuels vaccines. “However, it has a huge audience. It has a lot of sections,” he says.
Conspiracies are finding fertile ground among ethnic minorities, who have long protested about racism and medical inequality.
“I don’t trust the government,” said Lisa *, a 45-year-old support worker, passing Croydon hospital, who has refused her vaccine. “I’ve heard a lot of conspiracy theories,” she says, describing how six or seven vaccination warnings come over every day over WhatsApp.
“Sometimes I don’t have time to watch or read them all.”
Researchers say the importance of encrypted apps like WhatsApp makes the phenomenon more difficult to find and understand. “WhatsApp is very popular for everyone but it is very popular with minority ethnic communities,” says Panjwani.
In order to explore the obscure platform, organizations like Full Fact have to rely on messages that are either screenshot or forwarded to them. There is no audit function. “Our ability to see what kind of misinformation is out there and affect some communities is limited,” he says.
WhatsApp has tried to bypass chain messages. Following rumors leaked by WhatsApp chains linked to killings and attempts at slavery in India, in 2019 the Facebook-owned company imposed global restrictions, meaning a message sent on forward Forwarded many times.
However, the wrong information is still coming. Lisa * says that some messages falsely state that the Government is trying to dismantle the current financial system so that Bitcoin can be replaced; Others mistakenly believe that artificial intelligence has cut off large workers and so the Government is influencing the use of vaccines in an attempt to eradicate them.
There is no evidence for any of the theories that Lisa cites. But wonders like the pro-Trump QAnon movement show how even unfounded distant ideas in reality can be an online snowball, eventually spinning into violence.
Like QAnon, the anti – vaccine content circulating in Britain also reveals divisions that weave together misinformation and fact, making it difficult to separate the two.
In June, a speech by Matt Hancock sparked online suspicion after the health secretary suggested that BAME groups could prioritize the vaccine once it had been approved by regulators, due to several studies showing that the these groups have been adversely affected by the virus.