Facebook Parenting Teams Are The New Goal For Extremist Misinformation

Having become more extremist, formerly mainstream parenting groups have become less popular via Facebook. … [+]Targeted through disinformation campaigns

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The Facebook parent group is a mixed bag of criticism, support and bad advice. All parents know that. Still, they were mainstream communities that parents could turn to when it came to an often lonely task: raising children.

George Washington University researchers have now discovered that Facebook parent groups were infiltrated by extremist groups with misinformation shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic.

misinformation and social media

While social media is known to spread misinformation, researchers are struggling to understand exactly how it happens. To better understand parent communities on Facebook, researchers at GW examined over 100 million Facebook parent groups. They specifically focused on the online health debate of late 2020. The truth was that the misinformation spread from one group to another, so it turned out there were a lot.

“By studying social media on an unprecedented scale, we have uncovered why mainstream communities like parents have been inundated with misinformation during the pandemic and where it’s coming from,” researcher Neil Johnson, a professor of physics at GW, said in a press release .

The researchers found what they termed a “powerful, two-pronged misinformation machine.” The more insidious of the two was a “core of tight-knit but largely under-the-radar anti-vaccination communities that continually provided misinformation about Covid-19 and vaccines to the mainstream parenting communities,” they wrote in the article. This means that they were opponents of vaccination who had already decided against vaccination.

The other pillar was “a strengthening of the bond between mainstream parenting communities and pre-Covid conspiracy theory communities that promote misinformation about climate change, fluoride, chemtrails and 5G,” the researchers wrote. But these groups influenced mainstream parenting groups on Facebook through a “channel,” the alternative health and wellness communities that inspire with punchy and inspirational messages about how to keep the immune system healthy.

Although Facebook platform moderators should be aware of such things, the anti-vaxx and conspiracy theory groups were small enough that they most likely didn’t even get the moderators’ attention.

“Our results challenge any moderation approach that focuses on the largest, and thus seemingly most visible, communities as opposed to the smaller, more embedded ones,” Johnson said. “Clearly combating online conspiracy theories and misinformation cannot be accomplished without considering these multi-community sources and channels.”

Their solution is one that Facebook must implement itself: “a simple but exactly solvable mathematical theory for the dynamics of the system” that “predicts a new strategy for controlling the mainstream community’s turning points.” Even better, the researchers believe their model can work on any social media platform with communities.

What can parents do to prevent social media misinformation?

The researchers concluded that the spread of highly contagious misinformation by a few dedicated followers infected mainstream parent groups and affected the majority of the population. Parents can only pay attention to the impact Facebook can have on us.

Parents can be more critical of what they read knowing the influence of hardcore parenting groups, which most parents try to avoid. Parents can also contact their doctor.