Washington Post: “Facebook is conducting a vast behind-the-scenes study of doubts expressed by U.S. users about vaccines, a major project that attempts to probe and teach software to identify the medical attitudes of millions of Americans, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. The research is a large-scale attempt to understand the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy, or the act of delaying or refusing a vaccine despite its availability, on social media – a primary source of health information for millions of people. It shows how the company is probing ever more nuanced realms of speech, and illustrates how weighing free speech versus potential for harm is more tenuous than ever for technology companies during a public health crisis. While Facebook has banned false and misleading statements about coronavirus vaccines since December, a huge realm of expression about vaccines sits in a gray area. One example could be comments by someone expressing concern about side effects that are more severe than expected. Those comments could be both important for fostering meaningful conversation and potentially bubbling up unknown information to health authorities – but at the same time they may contribute to vaccine hesitancy by playing upon people’s fears. The research explores how to address that tension by studying these types of comments, which are tagged “VH” by the company’s software algorithms, as well as the nature of the communities that spread them, according to the documents. Its early findings suggest that a large amount of content that does not break the rules may be causing harm in some communities, where it has an echo chamber effect…

Nearly 30% of Americans – and half of Republican men – say they do not intend to get one of the three federally approved vaccines, according to a March poll by PBS NewsHour, Marist and NPR. An Associated Press/NORC study from late January found that the top reasons for concern over the vaccinations were fear of side effects, distrust of vaccines, and desire to wait and possibly get it later…”