“Luciferon” and the devil’s tattoo”: Coronavirus fakes are spreading across Russia
In Russia, the main source of fakes about the coronavirus are mainly marginal communities, but social networks do not seek to delete such information so as not to lose traffic.
This conclusion, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports, was reached by the Association of Internet Technologies, which prepared the report “Anti-vaxxer content in social networks: threats of the influence of fakes and the position of social networks.”
As Kommersant reports, to assess the extent of the spread of fakes, the study authors used an automated keyword search on social networks, and then manually excluded irrelevant results. The key criterion for “anti-vaccination content” was the presence of anti-vaccination propaganda based on pseudoscientific theories and theses: “There are chips in vaccines,” “everyone vaccinated will die in two years,” “this is Bill Gates’ project to chip the population.”
The authors also provide specific examples of fakes.
“For example, the author of one of them analyzes in detail the composition of vaccines and finds supposedly toxic substances in them: “Think a hundred times before injecting yourself.” Another post tells the story of how customs officers at one airport claimed that vaccinated people could be identified using metal detector frames due to the presence of heavy metals in their bodies. Also popular is the false claim that the vaccine contains a certain “Luciferon”, which creates a tattoo of the devil under the skin,” the study says.
A unique rating of social networks was also compiled based on the presence of content related to the anti-vaccination protest, for which the number of communities and individual users distributing such content to an audience of more than 200 thousand subscribers was calculated.
The largest number of such pages were found on VKontakte - 122 communities, to which 11 million accounts are subscribed. In terms of the total number of subscribers, Odnoklassniki is ahead: 85 million accounts are subscribed to 18 popular pages with fakes about the coronavirus.
Experts believe that the protest against vaccination on social networks is consolidated around marginal movements, including, in particular, the community “National Union for the Revival of Russia”, the public pages “Dystopia and Utopia”, “Vedic World”, “Stalingrad TV Channel”, the movement’s Instagram page “Forty forty” and so on.
“The association believes that social networks do not always actively combat false information, since it contributes to traffic growth. Thus, Facebook prefers to label such content as “false information”, but does not prevent its promotion. 44% of respondents believe that the most effective method of combating fakes is to block such communities, 33% consider deleting publications sufficient, 20% are confident that special labeling will be enough,” the report notes.
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