As scientists around the world race to find a vaccine for COVID-19, a new study highlights the extent of disinformation about vaccinations and predicts anti-vaccination opinions may dominate social media platforms in this next decade.
Researchers studied more than 1,300 pages on Facebook, followed by about 85 million people, Nature News reports.
Computer simulations suggest that opposition to vaccines might dominate Facebook within 10 years, researchers said.
They found that though anti-vaccination pages tend to have fewer followers than pro-vaccination pages, there are more anti-vaccinations pages. Anti-vaccination pages also tend to blend several themes together, such as conspiracy theories and alternative medicine suggestions, which can be potentially more attractive than pro-vaccination pages, which have only one message: Vaccines save lives.