The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views #RB20

welcome I'm julissa new episode of the mostly beneficial podcast so today we're going to discuss an important topic on social media which is misinformation in general and particular in the case for vaccination there's other debates on the internet between Pro and anti vaccination views and there's a recent paper in Nature that analyzes this is debate and in particular how different communities interact on this debate depending on whether they are pro ante or undecided and this is a very like I think it's a very important topic especially with the current situation where like it's been argued by many media many biologists or epidemiologist medical doctors that the the the main way may be the only way out of this pandemic so that we can really have a normal life again is if there's a vaccine solid vaccine reliable vaccine that's developed but also it needs to be implemented it needs to be accepted by the general public because we want to reach her dignity probably at least 60% if not a lot more of the population should be vaccinated and this means that if there are like 30 or 40 percents of people who are skeptical and don't want to vaccinate themselves then we may have an ongoing endemic at its core meaning that the corner virus may become a seasonal or or may come again and again every year in which case it could lead up to to potentially hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths per year yeah so as Lisa providing good information concerning vaccines it's a it's a question of it's a life-or-death situation and and this is what at least these paper requires quite striking by the the number of tensions concerning a taxi misinformation that are extremely high and quite surprising so what they did in the in the study consisted in analyzing a facebook pages so how many members at each page on Facebook ass and how do they link towards one another and for these to classify the do two pages into three categories the anti-vaxxers the probe access so pages for products vaccinations are pages like the Gates Foundation the big ritual page and also the majority of the pages were in the category and decided where and decided where groups that I've talked about vaccines but without taking any clear side on on their stance towards vaccine so for this decide for Parents Association for for schools or similar things and the first thing we we see that could be the reason why it's quite surprising to to see these numbers of the scale of misinformation is that these pages are separated in in two very distinct clusters there is the cluster of Pro vaccinations content the cluster of anti vaccination content and if you are in the in one one of these two two clusters you must actually nearly never see content from the other cluster so this is the concept known as a future purpose pushed by by recommender systems and so fact I need to say the D numbers out of all these pages they they found that the the pages containing anti vaccination that they had contained us about five five million members and pages for-profit summation contains about 7 million million members so but what I found surprise that it was approximately the same amount on a on both side so nearly 50/50 split even though the the scientific consensus on vaccine is there is no 50/50 split on that day it's a vast vast majority of scientists except one or two exceptions that are that considered back seem to be extreme useful yeah this case pretty huge a key to study that involves like clusters that add up to hundreds of millions of individuals and what they did industry is they particularly studied the interactions between different clusters so cluster is like a Facebook page and what they call the interaction or link is when a given Facebook page shares a link towards another Facebook page and this allows to see how the different clusters interact with one another and sort of the question we may ask is well what do most undecided pages link to and how do how does these clusters I can man can imagine you have a graph now like some some clusters we choose some clusters that control the clusters and you have this graph that it's going to get in a certain way and one thing they did is to try to visualize this graph by a very simple model where essentially each cluster is like naturally repel one another except for links that pull them together and like you can imagine that this dynamic the similarity the dynamic creates like large clusters of clusters and what they observed is that they were essentially like freak will be your clusters of clusters created this way two of them are somewhat with the pro vaccination like more dominated by Pro vaccination than anti vaccination cost Facebook pages but there are also smaller clusters of clusters and there's one bigger cluster of clusters where you have most of the Facebook pages and this one is actually dominated is like well infiltrated that's sort of like the visual impression you can get by looking at the image by the anti-vaccination Facebook pages so it's like the anti anti fax vaccination pages even though there are fewer of them and even though each of them is also smaller in size like they tend to be smaller whereas like the pro vaccination pages tend to be very large well these anti vaccination pages are somewhat better connected to undecided nodes and this may explain why currently these anti vaccination group are growing faster than the pro vaccination groups yeah just to correct on what you just said actually that the anti vaccination pages contain less members so slightly less members but they are more pages so they are more numerous Paige is talking about anti vaccinations and nonprofits in nation and this was quite a big difference at least between two and three times more anti vaccine pages than a pro vaccination yeah it's a quite interesting like in a sense like there's an ongoing war or battle it was too strong of the world there's an ongoing battle on the internet for on the on this debate and you can really almost see these are as territories that the different sides are trying to concur and what's sort of nice with this paper it's that you can of gives us a map of the ongoing battle and it allows to better understand not necessarily the intentional strategies but at least the effective us which is like again what's going on in this world and sort of the the insight that this gives us is that Pro vaccinations are probably doing a very good job at convincing the people that they reach out to but they don't reach out to most people they like the dark kind of isolated because the anti vaccination pages seem to be real-world better at infiltrating different other web pages another thing that they did in in the very place that were they try to model the dynamics of the of this battle in a sense and II and so they fit some some models so the model is quite sophisticated it's quite hard to explain or just to understand I can understand it at all but it's essentially a model that tries to fit with the current evolution of the dynamics of the battle and then they did projections for the future based on the model so it's sort of like saying I can we have this well the current situation seems to be quite explainable by or by certain dynamic and then they projected this dynamic for the future and what they observed what were their model predicted is very concerning since it raises the possibility that within a decade anti-vaccination views may become predominant which would be very very bad if this happens I'll give you brings us to maybe you want experience we had whenever I present it out with projects or give a talk about why we should care about robust recommender systems and why we should care about like robust machine learning 400 systems and I motivate that by vaccine up to up to last year people tell me like what this is not a big tread like like this is not a big deal but arguably it's it's growing like it's potential of growth is it scary and we are seeing it now it we would call it because if it keeps going like now now there are reports that the anti-vaccine movement is growing there is an anti-vaccine movement against an Kovach vaccine this growing faster than researchers are are getting closer to having a akavit vaccine so by the time we would have a covert vaccine you should expect that there would be already the community's anti vaccine communities would be ready they're like would hardly have their talking points and their influence on social media would have been established so this is a like the stakes are high I think and especially or the kwid situation very positive but more generally well health public health is especially vaccines have saved millions Cory hundreds of millions of lives in the last decade so yeah we're talking about big big numbers and one of the key feature of vaccination is herd immunity so herd immunity is the the fact that if sufficiently sufficiently large proportion of the population is vaccinated the int actually protects all of the population and the reason for this has to do with the the spread of the disease and the family the famous you've probably heard of the feminist famous reproduction number by now this alt or T and and this our number if it's smaller than 1 then the the pandemic just disappears by itself like it's exponentially decaying and so you save everybody well not everybody because that if few people die because of this but you like 99.99% of the occupation either is saved but if this all number gets larger than one and if this happens if they are not sufficiently many people vaccinated then you have an exponential growth of the pandemic and it can reach like 10% of the population and if the virus is quite deadly this can represent a effective year while millions if not hundreds of millions of deaths so I think that the stakes are high and it's not only about public health as we see in the current situation like just trying to fight the pandemic it puts a lot of stress on different other parts of the society like for instance economics so like unemployment has skyrocketed in the US and there's a lot of concerns about people not being able to afford living in many countries in the world especially developing countries but also it creates stress on and political tensions and critical decisions and and there can be a root a lot of good coming out of this maybe this will question some some bad ways of doing things but it can also create bad situation sure your bad economics is can cause some something very bad in terms of critics and we have historical examples of this so arguably the stakes here are or huge recce we really I think we're really talking about the fishermen can hear in many regards so one thing that we're interesting in doing is a somehow knowing how to fight a sort of misinformation and and spread the correct information in the paper day they dimension that doing the mapping like today than the day they also mentioned a few metrics like measuring the centrality of a proper cluster so of a Facebook page somehow it says how much that Facebook page can influence or the page on itself so correctly mapping the battlefield can help you change the way you communicate so tell you which page to target to better influence to this battle that's happening over this information and also like yeah all different interesting insights like another interesting insight from the paper which is more qualitative but I think it makes sense is the idea that the anti-vaccination movement relies on many different narratives and suffice is that one of these narratives even though the 19th of mutually incompatible or something this surface is that one of the narrative is consigned to to treat you one user or one cluster for this cluster to be convinced and to either adopt it so this is another way that this anti-vaccination movement can grow is by exploiting very different narratives and it's very hard to find against all of these narratives at once because they were multiple and you have to spend energy on each different narrative and so this is an interesting sideshow that it is very very hard to to combat these meeting misinformation in our discussion we we agree that features like hope pedagogical is some content and how engaging it is not only how scientifically accurate the content is the matters for for spreading this kind of information so if we if you want to correctly in from people about vaccines not only being scientifically accurate but also try to be engaging and pedagogical so that the so that the message is heard like you you won't which as many people as possible and for this scientific accuracy somehow pouring a man and hard to understand and and so it won't spread and it give the message is really not about right as much yeah and this may be quite a big limitation in today's a strategy of pro vaccination let's say or like I think more companies or so functions if you search for anti vaccination on Facebook one at least when I did like I don't know what you would get from me off Facebook not even energy vaccinations just search for vaccine on Amazon I like like if you don't like vaccine on another books you get anti-vaccine books yeah so maybe they've to change a disease okay when we had the book online and say you know one bird yeah and I remember vaccines or none of the books if you add vaccine books no no empty or raw or just vaccines yeah yeah but what I meant to say is that I think that there's a lot of book going on from facebook from YouTube from Google and so on to try to remove this content so when I searched the other day anti vaccination on Facebook I wish only recommended content from what World Health Organization John Hopkins University you searching for anti vaccine so yeah yeah yeah oh of course lucky it's only my data but I I'm guessing that they've done quite some effort from to try to reach promote more mentions I could be searched from anonymous browsers without without being connected yes was not influenced by my profile yeah yeah yeah so I think that there needs to be a lot of work like the the these recommendation platforms then they take they're not neutral and I keep it's not clear what it means for them to be neutral like on every topic should you chose 50/50 of every side of the question like if someone is searching one plus one equals two like do you are you going to show like half of the content spinning why 1 plus 1 is not equal to 2 probably not and so and really neutral like yeah that would we call it neutral to show 50/50 of videos saying that one person is not Costa - yeah probably not and yeah I think if one important thing talking to you to reflect on is that this concept of neutrality is a lot more complicated at least and the simple idea that you should do 50/50 on both sides on every question and and I think you should actually try to you to be more well-versed even if you're given the stakes especially for for this kind of topic why it's a matter of life and death and at large scale and so you might say okay so I'm going to try to shift the battlefield like you tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu to favor like once and scientific consensus I don't think it would be that controversial for many topics at least but in any case like this is something that many big software platforms are trying to move towards at least from what they say also from some who is also I've made but the concern I still have is that the way they're doing this right now is by promoting systematically contents from the big John Hopkins are from University or from whu-oh and the contents that's spread by these very trusted or trustworthy institutions is not the one that may be the most engaging or the most compelling and instead of this maybe if you get some influences to convey the same message it would be a lot more impactful of course it's also harder to identify this kind of content from influencers because it's easier to to fall for YouTube phone since you say well we just recommend systematic he what WIC but I'll give you also less effective that's what I meant to say so it's a very complicated topic overall just the question of what should you recommend on on these on these platforms and I think that needs to be a lot more research in this direction yeah adding to this concerning what we discussed last week about some how the backfire effect the fact that if you want to show content seeing a not X to someone that believes in X it does not necessarily make them believe in not X right away and in some cases it can make them believe in what they believe in even stronger by opposition to to where they are shown so as I say so so in content from from the big groups doing scientific research on vaccines it's not totally obvious that it won't at this this effect that people would further distance to to to what they read because it's opposite to to adequately take the country yeah yeah I know world it's like intersects with a lot of different fields but understand the understanding the psychology of users and how they react to this gap or that kind of content even though it's coming from dojo from the World Health Organization yeah I think is a very open question we need better understanding of how people react to science communication in general we also discussed about the possibility of banning such a Search Facebook page or such groups and that it might it sounds terrible that it might not be fully effective like YouTube has been burning some some some creators especially far-right content creators and I was so like recently you had the story of Twitter removing tweet from Donald Trump and putting it back I think it's very complicated too and there's a huge backfire your risk in particular in the case of the far-right video content creators a lot of them have moved to another platform called the beach shoot and and this well if you just get one in one of if you want you ban people people still produce that content and they bring their followers with them to another platform then argue be so huge cost him in the battle I'd say because like you you are using a lot of the influence you could have had on these people and in particular the algorithmic recommendations or that could be made more beneficial on YouTube will have no effect on on this shoot instance so that's clearly this risk and people may even be more angry more I think a lot of the issue with conspiracy theories and particular entity vaccinations is that they often related to being against the system in general or interior authorities and so you can imagine that removing them from this platform just justifies their narratives and will increase their influence on other platforms it's at least to consider when you I think here when you considering the possibility of of banning people from platforms next week we will discuss computable philosophy which is a proposal a course proposal by Lee and me in which we tackle some aspects and computing computability computer science the historical aspects of computing itself and the the the interlinks between computing and judgments and stuff like that and why - actually just like why why computer scientists should care more about philosophy to give it another name today if UNIX it