Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube. Each of these digital platforms has a contribution to make to the denialist edema around vaccines. And Telegram has a special place in this debate: the tool for exchanging messages that was almost blocked in Brazil is a strategic space to produce disinformation that will be shared by cell phone and other social networks.
A kind, therefore, of an organizing pole for anti-vaccination movements. This is what a survey by UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais) points out, which monitored, for six months in 2021, the digital debate on immunizations in Brazil. The period, from June to November, coincided with the acceleration of the vaccination campaign against Covid-19 in the country.
Telegram entered the hot seat after the decision of STF (Federal Supreme Court) Minister Alexandre de Moraes to obstruct the application in the country. The order did not need to be put into practice because, after failed attempts at dialogue, Telegram finally responded to the Brazilian justice system.
The study shows that the tool founded in 2013 by two Russian brothers serves as a regeneration zone for dropped pages in other apps.
If, for example, Instagram deactivates a profile that posts fake news about immunizers, Telegram takes action to re-articulate the deleted account as soon as possible.
“The channel on Telegram serves to bring people together and start new pages if, at some point, Instagram blocks the pages that are being used, including ‘backups’ and ‘mirror’ profiles, without posts but ready to start working”, says the work coordinated by the Center for Education in Collective Health of the Faculty of Medicine, in partnership with the National Council of Municipal Health Departments.
A sample of what we’re talking about: @reacoesvacinacovid19, an Instagram account that trumpeted alleged truths about vaccines that were being hidden from people, had been banned by the platform in April 2021. There was already @reacoesvacinacovid19_v3 as a reserve page to welcome the followers left at random. Because Telegram was instrumental in activating this screening.
During the pandemic, all sorts of fake news on the subject circulated: doses capable of altering the DNA of those who received them, or even related to the transmission of HIV – a falsehood that was even spread by President Jair Bolsonaro.
Academic follow-up followed 15 Telegram groups with an anti-vax proposal. There, he detected a platform laden with emotional reports, “which deal with situations of suffering of family members supposedly killed by adverse reactions to vaccines”.
Religious components are another strong point of the negationist discourse. These are messages like the one that recently circulated on the platform: “Vaccine is the main mark of the beast, on the forehead. The mark on the hand, be it a health passport, chip, quantum tattoo or any other filth that appears, is secondary”.
“This idea that the vaccine is a chip or mark of the beast has appeared several times, as have complaints that many pastors and priests are helping vaccination,” says data analyst João Guilherme Santos, a researcher at the National Institute of Science and Technology in Digital Democracy and one of those responsible for monitoring.
Another important function of the application: to orchestrate coordinated actions against parliamentarians who defend measures that displease the anti-vaccination movement.
It happened to Senator Nilda Gondim (MDB-PB), who shared in her networks a bill that authorizes employers to fire employees for just cause who refuse to be stabbed in the arm. “She turned off comments on Insta[gram]. Let’s go to Facebook[book]”, guided a post.
Santos prefers not to prioritize Telegram’s role in the disinformation chain. Better to think of an integrated system, he says. Example: instead of trying to calculate whether YouTube is more harmful than Telegram, or vice versa, “we understand it as a combination”.
It’s that story of union that makes strength. A denialist compilation on YouTube, with 1 million views, is powerful in popularizing an idea. Until it is dropped, it goes off the air, and the material is lost, says the researcher. “But if you have 10,000 cell phones forwarding the video, you have 10,000 replicas of that content. It’s virtually impossible to erase that. In terms of survival [do teor]10 thousand can be more valuable than 1 million.”
The UFMG research shows how each tool has something to offer to the denialist web. Twitter, with its sense of urgency, helps with quick virals. YouTube’s audiovisual assets create a larger narrative. Instagram is great at passing messages with easy to assimilate images. Telegram, on the other hand, presents the “community foundation conducive to collective mobilization”.
“I would say that it is not possible to point out any [rede] with more potential for damage”, says Ricardo Fabrino Mendonça, coordinator of the Research Group on Democracy and Justice at UFMG, which provided researchers for the monitoring project.
“Each one of them has its risks and benefits. But platforms like Whatsapp and Telegram have this capillary dissemination capacity that is not always completely public and visible, which can benefit actors who want to disseminate dangerous content. This game of light and shadow in which content circulates diverse brings new challenges to democracy.”
Another point still to be considered is the damage that these groups allergic to the idea of immunization can cause in the long term to vaccine coverage.
The design of the research even predates the pandemic. The idea was to investigate why Brazilians have been vaccinated less in the last decade, a phenomenon that includes several social factors.
The year 2021 registered a historic drop in the immunization of children and adolescents, the worst performance in more than 30 years. A lot must be taken into account here: recent cuts in federal advertisements about the children’s vaccine schedule and even a population that no longer remembers the damage caused by diseases eradicated precisely by an efficient vaccine network in Brazil.
What the researchers want to see now is whether the anti-vaccine network that emerged during the Covid-19 crisis can extend to other immunizers, as seen in the US and Europe.
Santos recalls that there is a whole spectrum for those who hesitate to get vaccinated, ranging from the apathetic (they do not deny the severity of the disease, but for some reason they do not seek its dose) to the conspiracyists (they even believe in population control through injected liquid chips in citizens).
“Not everyone who is suspicious of vaccines is adept at conspiracy theories. And when we treat everything as if it were the same thing, we deliver these people to the most staunch denialists”, says the data analyst.
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