Short Wave - Vaccines, Misinformation, And The Internet (Part 1)

Episode Date: February 26, 2020

In the first of two episodes exploring anti-vaccine misinformation online, we hear the story of what happened to Cincinnati-area pediatrician Nicole Baldwin when her pro-vaccine TikTok video made her the target of harassment and intimidation from anti-vaccine activists online. Renee DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory explains their tactics and goals.You can see Dr. Baldwin's original TikTok here. Renee DiResta has written about how some anti-vaccine proponents harass, intimidate, and spread misinformation online here. Email the show at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. This song from 2007, The Cupid Shuffle, is pretty big on TikTok. TikTok is a social media app where users make and share short videos, many of them using and reusing viral sounds or song clips. This one is pretty popular with people making dance and exercise videos. But on January 10th of this year, Nicole Baldwin got a different idea. I had just posted my first video two days prior, so I was very new on TikTok, and I'll admit I enjoy the Cupid shuffle. I mean, you don't have to admit it.

It's not something to be ashamed of. I know. Nicole is a pediatrician near Cincinnati. She has a parenting blog. She's super active on social media. A lot of the stuff she posts online is about kids and friends. family health. So she decided to do a post, using the Cupid shovel, about vaccines. So, you know, listening to that song and thinking, okay, how do I do this?

Nicole filmed herself doing a little dance and posted a text box in the video that says, vaccines prevent, and then on each beat, measles, mumps, grubella, polio, pertussis, hepatitis, influenza, pneumocococ, as a mavelas, all of those different diseases that vaccines prevent. And at the end of the video, says vaccines don't cause autism. That's all that it is. And what happened next, given, you know, the internet? Don't get me started about the internet. Might not surprise you.

That is the cause of all of this. New at 11, a Mason pediatrician is under fire after a video she posted to social media supporting vaccine. More than 1.4 million views. But that prompted a barrage of hateful responses. One social media user called Baldwin. Public anime number one. And another commenter told the pediatrician to stop killing our kids with vaccines. The video went up on a Friday.

By Sunday, after she'd shared the video on Twitter, too. I was sitting on my couch and I was watching on Twitter, like, just the likes and the retweets, just like flipping. They just kept going up and up. And I was like, whoa, this is something. Nicole had activated a vocal group within the larger anti-vaccine community and was about to learn the hard way, how they traffic in misinformation tactics, harassment, and intimidation. She made the video on TikTok. People on Facebook were angry by it. They found her profile on Facebook. They also found her Twitter. And they found her practice. Today, the first of two episodes

on vaccines, misinformation, and the internet. This episode, Nicole Baldwin's story. We talked to an expert about how anti-vaccine proponents target people online. And tomorrow, tomorrow, Tomorrow, we'll look at why the Internet is so good at spreading misinformation. I'm Maddie Safaya, and this is Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. So, today we're focusing on how doctors who talk about the benefits of vaccines are targeted and harassed online. Now, obviously not everyone in the anti-vaccine community participates in this kind of intimidation. But in this episode, we're talking about those who choose to do so. those who go after people like Dr. Baldwin.

She's a pediatrician who, like other doctors, talks about what science has proved about childhood vaccines time and time again, that they are safe and effective. So, back to her video. Well, so I think what really made it different was not necessarily that it was going viral on TikTok. As often happens, things got really bad when Twitter got involved.

But it was the fact that I tweeted it, and then the tweet went viral. So when the tweet was going viral... In response to the Twitter traffic from her original TikTok post, Nicole posted on Facebook, again, emphasizing what is known from scientific studies on literally thousands upon thousands of children, that there is no link between vaccines and autism.

You know, they were trickling in kind of just negative things, people calling me bad names, or telling me I didn't know what I was talking about, or, you know, putting false information about, vaccines. Nicole knew the best she could do was delete comments and ban users from her Facebook page. But as fast as she could ban some users, new ones would show up in bigger numbers at all hours of the day. From different states in the U.S., from New Zealand, from the U.K., everyone was attacking from every time zone, and it was happening 24-7. Some of the tamer comments

we'll share. When you lie for a living, this puts you below a prostitute. Come near me or my child with a needle, and I will put it in your jugular. They also went to my online reviews, so Google and Yelp, and then they also started calling my practice, calling my practice, calling me a pedophile, saying horrible things, and then we actually got a caller that threatened to come and shut down my practice. There's a term for this kind of mass online harassment. It's called doxing. So it's using harassment to sort of silence other voices from the conversation. Renee DeResta, who you heard a little bit earlier, is the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She studies how misinformation spreads online. We spoke about how

doxing works and her own experience with it. It's to try to make it feel like it really it feels like you're under attack, particularly for people who are, you know, have a professional relationship or a professional career where their reputation is important. They're very concerned that their friends are seeing this, their colleagues, their clients. So it's to create an environment in which they think twice before doing it again. And you've experienced some of this harassment yourself, right? I have. I have to imagine. I have. Well, in 2015, I wrote an article about the dynamics of anti-vaccine Twitter, particularly in a very specific context, actually, it was in the context of SB 277, which was a bill under consideration in California at

the time to eliminate vaccine opt-outs. And I wrote a little bit about the tactics and the dynamics, the way in which out-of-state activists were harassing California state legislators on Twitter and things like that. And then I got doxed and harassed. And, you know, my address was posted. Pictures of my children were posted. And again, the goal was really to intimidate. So it's a deeply unsettling experience to all of a sudden have what feels like the entire internet yelling at you. And imagine that was how it was for Dr. Baldwin as well. How these communities get built and mobilize is something we could spend hours unspooling. Suffice it to say, they are really savvy when it comes to their social media use.

According to Renee, one of the most effective things the anti-vaccine community does is make their groups seem larger than they actually are. This played out in recent years, also in California, when anti-vaccine proponents from outside the state began calling lawmakers to oppose the bill, Renee mentioned. And so the legislative offices started asking for addresses and zip codes. And then you actually saw in the Facebook groups people kind of like trading, you know, well, you can go to Redfin or Trulia and you can get a vacant address there. And it's insane ways to, again, create the perception that some activists in Texas was a Californian. Renee has also reported on anti-vaccine groups, spying ads online, targeting pregnant women, co-opting hashtags from public health campaigns to get in front of more people. That kind of anti-vaccine messaging has been shown to get a foothold in certain small communities. There are certain pockets of under-vaccinated communities, and that allows these diseases to take hold.

And when that happens, there are epidemics. Because what happens is there are some people in the community who can't get vaccinated. There are elderly people who maybe the protection of the vaccine has worn off. There are people for whom vaccination just doesn't work, right? It's, you know, small percentage of people, but they exist. And so the issue became what happens as these pockets, as these clusters, continue to grow. That happened in Minnesota around 2008, after anti-vaccine groups targeted a small Somali community.

Immunization rates eventually dropped from above 90% to under 45, and resulted in a measles outbreak affecting more than 70 children. So what do you do as a physician when a parent has concerns about vaccines? Well, Dr. Baldwin says, in her experience, not many do. For the most part, and I think the other thing that everyone maybe doesn't realize is that the large majority of people are pro-vaccine and actually don't have a ton of questions. In fact, it's important to mention that in the United States,

national childhood vaccine rates have been and remain high. That said, if a parent comes into her practice, apprehensive about vaccines, she tries to keep an open dialogue. So I talk to them, I asked them, you know, hey, what questions do you have about this? What have you heard about this on the Internet that is, you know, making you fearful. And then I kind of educate them on, okay, this is what the science is. This is what the data is. This is what we're preventing. And then we talk about it. And if they choose to not get it that

day, they choose to not get it that day. I'm not going to, you know, force that on them. But we have a conversation. And, you know, that's what I'm there for. Simply listening in an open way to concerns can be powerful. Standing up to harassment and misinformation, like the kind she got after posting her TikTok video, is powerful too. Did you ever consider taking it down? No. So I think that for me, that is part of what the anti-vaccine community wants. I think that's part of the reason this strategy, they continue to play it out because, you know, they continue to attack, attack, attack, and they want someone to take their posts down because then that, it almost seems like they've won in a way, you know, and I was not going to give in to that bullying or that fear. Yeah, just not my personality.

You know, ironically, Dr. Baldwin is an example of doing it right. Yeah. Doing it right. Exactly. Right. Renee DeResta at Stanford again. A lot of times, I think there was particularly among folks like the. the leaders of the CDC and World Health Organization, a belief that what happens on social is

kind of of the people, but not of academia or not scientifically vetted. And so it was, you know, while those people are talking about some things and they're wrong about some things, but we're not going to engage because that'll just call more attention to it. And so in a way, they were having a completely different conversation. They would maybe put out an automated tweet about how the measles vaccine was safe, but they weren't in any way engaging with people who were on the fence. They weren't engaging with people who had questions. And so the people who were responding to those questions,

who were engaging with the fence sitters, was the anti-vaccine side. But it's not just the aggressive nature of the anti-vaccine movement that helps misinformation take hold. In a whole host of ways, it's the Internet itself. The viral nature of the content, the way it's disseminated, how rapidly it's disseminated, the fact that popularity and engagement is what drives what goes kind of farthest and fastest, this is the way that the social infrastructure is designed. That's what we'll cover tomorrow on the show.

You can see Dr. Baldwin's original TikTok video and a link to some of Renee Doresta's research on vaccine misinformation in the episode notes. This episode was produced by Brent Bachman, edited by by Andrea Kissick and fact-checked by Rebecca Ramirez. I'm Maddie Safaya. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.