Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
Facebook’s advertising platform is being used to widely circulate anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and misinformation as the nation is attempting to control the resurgence of childhood illnesses that can easily be prevented through vaccinations.
PAY DIRT compiled data on seven Facebook pages now running promoted anti-vaccine posts in the United States. Together, they have bought 147 ads on the platform, ads that have been viewed between 1.6 million and 5.2 million times. They overwhelmingly target women over the age of 25—about 72 percent of the people who viewed them were in that demographic—the group most likely to include mothers of children who might need to be vaccinated.
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Many of the ads are targeted at Facebook users in states that are dealing with public-health issues that could be averted through more widespread vaccinations. One group, Stop Mandatory Vaccinations, has run 10 Facebook ads targeted to users in Washington state, where the governor last week declared a public-health emergency in response to the outbreak of measles. Washingtonians have seen those ads as many as 276,000 times.
Other anti-vaccine Facebook advertisers exist to promote the issue in specific states where vaccines have become a hot-button public-health and legislative issue. Groups in Michigan, Ohio, Colorado, and Mississippi have all bought anti-vaccine ads targeted to residents in their states.
As with any online communities devoted to esoteric issues such as the (disproven) dangers of vaccines, the Facebook groups promoting these theories tend to attract people who already harbor or are familiar with the community’s views. Those who opt in to such communities tend to have sought them out, and hence are more likely to be predisposed toward their positions.
But Facebook ads allow these groups to reach outside of the normally small, self-contained circle of true believers and speak to a massive pool of ad targets who might be unfamiliar with the issue and open to persuasion. That could seriously amplify the damage that messaging does among populations already at risk for preventable illnesses.
Get the data:
