On February 8, Facebook announced a harder line against Covid-19 and vaccine disinformation, outlining a range of specific, patently false statements about Covid-19 and vaccines that it would remove. We had a question: Were posts containing the claims still spreading? If so, how many were there, and what kind of reach did they have?
Our investigation focused exclusively on unfounded Covid-19 vaccine claims, such as that the vaccines change people’s DNA. Using data scraped from Facebook’s insights tool, CrowdTangle, we found at least 3,200 posts, attracting 142,049 likes, shares and comments, that had been posted on the platform after the ban.
From seed to story, it took around a month before we published these and other findings with WIRED UK. Here are some of the ethical and technical challenges we had to consider and how we addressed them, followed by a step-by-step methodology.
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Source: How we investigated Covid-19 vaccine misinformation on Facebook