People will die if the government doesn’t make fighting health misinformation a priority. Unfortunately, some already are.
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In the first half of 2021, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists found that only 40% of women offered the Covid-19 vaccine took it. The reason? They were waiting for more, and in some cases, more concrete evidence to convince them that it was safe for them and their unborn baby.
This was despite NHS guidance stating that vaccines are not only safe, but that you are at greater risk of serious illness from Covid-19 if you are pregnant. The mixed messages about vaccine safety spread on social media have caused serious and irreparable damage. By October 2021, 1 in 5 of the most severe Covid patients were unvaccinated pregnant women.
The misinformation we see on social media ends up being replicated outside of online spaces. Just over a year after we saw so many seriously ill pregnant women in our hospitals, Full Fact, the fact-checking charity that fights misinformation, had to step in after – suggested the deputy that mRNA vaccines are not recommended for pregnant women and those who are breastfeeding.
But the problem doesn’t stop at maternal care, which is just one example of how bad health information can cause serious harm and even cost lives. Supporters who contacted Full Fact this year told us about the pain of losing loved ones due to misinformation surrounding Covid-19 and the helplessness they felt at being swept up in conspiracy theories and misinformation about efficacy and safety vaccine.
The bakers’ union and members of parliament order Scrooge’s bosses to pay redundancy payments to workers before Christmas
The Bakers’ Union and MPs will order Scrooge’s bosses to pay redundancy payments to workers before Christmas
This is not isolated to the pandemic; Misinformation pervades all aspects of health and healthcare. This month alone, we’ve had to check out a few misleading claims about Strep Aas well as the strange idea that cancer can be cured with lemons.
The evidence is clear – bad information about our health can be deadly. And yet our government has decided to ignore the hard lessons of the pandemic by removing provisions from the Internet Safety Bill that could help combat health misinformation.
What does the Government offer?
Every day at Full Fact, we see how the misinformation that is repeated over and over again on the internet becomes harder to challenge. Once false claims are made and spread, misinformation permeates our discourse, politics, and undermines people’s trust in real, good information.
In the Internet Safety Bill, the government now proposes to simply leave it up to platforms to decide whether they have policies to combat health misinformation in their terms of service, and then leave them to themselves as long as they apply their policies consistently. But why should an internet company decide what kind of misinformation can cause serious harm, rather than parliament or an independent regulator? Such matters, which have implications for freedom of expression as well as public safety, should be brought up for open democratic discussion.
The government’s latest changes to the bill make us all vulnerable. Her suggestions mean we may well be witnessing a race to the bottom in terms of service as platforms seek to give themselves maximum flexibility to minimize the risk of hacking, with harmful misinformation flourishing.
Twitter’s recent sudden decision to no longer enforce its policy on misleading information surrounding Covid-19 highlights the problem. Previously, misleading information about Covid-19 could be flagged with corrective information, and tweets that were highly damaging could be removed. Now, unbeknownst to the users of the platform, this misinformation has been allowed to spread.
Health-related misinformation and disinformation undermines public health. The government knows this and should bring health misinformation back into the scope of the bill, as it did a few weeks ago. Platforms should have a clear policy for dealing with harmful, false and misleading health information in the terms of service, which does not involve simply censoring or removing content.
Decisions about freedom of expression and health misinformation now rest solely in the power of social media. But we’ve already seen with Twitter why it doesn’t work. That’s why Full Fact is calling on parliamentarians to challenge the government’s decision to renege on a promise to include protections against health misinformation in the Internet Safety Bill.
If the Internet Safety Bill means our freedom of speech is threatened while dangerous health misinformation is allowed to spread unchecked, surely it has failed in its aim to make the UK the safest place to be online?
Glenn Thurman, Head of Policy and Advocacy at Full Fact
