In thousands of Facebook groups dedicated to health and wellness, misinformation spreads rapidly. Members share fake stories of babies’ killed by vaccines. Parents post that they’ve “cured” their autistic children by feeding them bleach. These claims, and dozens of others, are untrue, but Facebook does little to stop them from reaching millions of users. For nearly a year, NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny has investigated the ways in which health misinformation spreads online, particularly on Facebook. She traced the origins of persistent myths and examined who is benefitting from them and who is harmed. She profiled the parents and health advocates who are fighting these falsehoods. And she illustrated the devastating public health consequences when inaccuracies go unchecked. Each story in the series explores a different element of misinformation:
-In May, Zadrozny was first to report on two mothers who infiltrate private Facebook groups to expose parents who describe using dubious, dangerous methods to try to “heal” their children’s autism — a condition with no medically known cause or cure. The two mothers track down the parents who post about trying fake cures on their children and report them to Child Protective Services, a practice that highlighted Facebook’s lax health misinformation policies and its tendency to rely on concerned users as unpaid content moderators. “Kids are being abused,” one of the mothers said. “I’m not the kind of person who can see something like that and just forget about it.”
-In June, Zadrozny uncovered the story of a Kansas mother who was dosing her autistic sons with chlorine dioxide, which amounts to industrial bleach — a tactic so commonly touted in private Facebook groups for parents of autistic kids that the FDA recently warned against it. The mother posted online about her attempts to rid her sons of autism and drew the attention of police, doctors and welfare officials. But after looking into the family, the authorities, in part convinced by false descriptions of chlorine dioxide that they’d read online, all decided not to intervene, Zadrozny found.
-In September, Zadrozny and NBC News reporter Aliza Nadi investigated a Minnesota mother’s claims that vaccines had killed her baby daughter. The mother, Catelin Clobes, has become a star of the anti-vaccination world, raising thousands of dollars for the cause. But Zadrozny and Nadi discovered that Clobes’ 6-month-old daughter had died not of complications from vaccines but rather of accidental suffocation while co-sleeping with her. Through Clobes’ story, Zadrozny and Nadi told the story of how a few well-funded anti-vaccination organizations use Facebook to find and recruit bereaved mothers, and use their stories to generate more income and interest for their cause. Zadrozny isn’t merely devoted to pointing out problems — her reporting also highlights the advocates, academics and officials trying to effect positive change on social platforms. They include vaccination advocates who are using social media to fight anti-vaxxers on their own turf and experts who are pushing Facebook to make reforms.