Beware of the trolls

By Anthony Hughes

Last week we highlighted some of the ethical and reputational challenges that face companies around the rollout of the various vaccines for Covid-19. If those weren’t complicated enough, widespread disinformation campaigns are making the politics of ‘the vaccine’ even more complicated.

In recent years most people have become increasingly aware of a growing anti-vaccination movement, one of the many conspiracy theory-type movements that has used social media platforms to amplify their agendas with devastating effect. Many people will have simply dismissed these conspiracies as they are to some degree immunised against them, but there are also many people that don’t and should be of increasing concern to all, especially where vaccines are concerned.

It goes without saying that when facing a crisis like a global health pandemic, having access to good information is paramount. Incorrect information can lead to poor decision-making which, in this case, could lead to serious health risks for millions.

With the vaccines for COVID-19 in development for only 10 months it is understandable that some people are nervous about taking it. Very few people are vaccine experts, so in order to make a decision about whether you should take a new vaccine (or any new drug for that matter) clear, high quality, unbiased information is needed to make informed decisions. I would go so far as to say that rarely in the last few decades has it been so important – the future of a great many lives depends on it.

The coronavirus pandemic has already provided fertile ground for massive scale propaganda and disinformation campaigns by both fringe movements and state actors, often by way of deniable third parties, seeking to gain political advantage during this volatile period.  There’s evidence that these campaigns are being waged with increasing sophistication. ‘Mask diplomacy’ and the ‘politics of generosity’ has been covered in the media, but the problem is that in this global battle of narratives, ostensibly between the EU, US, Russia and China, so called ‘useful idiots’ are fuelling both the geo-political propaganda and unhelpful conspiracy theories that make the truth and facts a lot harder to discern. For hostile state actors this is useful because it builds instability and division in target countries which they can capitalise on and / or build support for their own narrative.

COVID-19 vaccines, it seems are already becoming another battleground for disinformation and subversion. Research by corporate intelligence firm Kalita Partners, analysed more than 100,000 social media accounts which have posting content on the subject of COVID-19 vaccines since the 20^th November 2020. As you might imagine, those accounts produced a huge amount of social media traffic related to the topic (posts, replies, likes comments, etc). Most of the traffic can be attributed to information campaigns targeting different agendas according to the hashtags or quotations used. Kalita analysed those campaigns from the traffic manipulation standpoint and concluded that approximately 30% of them have signs of artificial amplification via bots and trolls.

According to Kalita, the source of this disinformation about vaccines is a broad range of groups including generic MAGA/Q-anon accounts, UK and US covid-deniers and antivaxers, racial extremist groups and a whole host of others, from climate change deniers to Indian commercial bots which spread the disinformation to create traffic or scams (not actually interested in the content itself).

So the question is, will the vaccine become the latest casualty in this age of disinformation warfare? I really hope not, after all, it should be in the interest of almost everyone on the planet that they work – even, ironically, antivaxers.

What I am sure of is that conspiracy theories and misinformation are continuing to erode much needed trust in institutions and divide our societies. As we move into the next decade, companies and governments will need to work that much harder to build and retain trust of their publics and to protect themselves from this growing disinformation threat.