Covid19 Vaccines & Online Artificial Amplification

COVID-19 vaccines, it seems are already becoming another battleground for disinformation and subversion. Research by corporate intelligence firm Kalita Partners, analysed more than 100,000 social media accounts which have posting content on the subject of COVID-19 vaccines since the 20th November 2020. As you might imagine, those accounts produced a huge amount of social media traffic related to the topic (posts, replies, likes comments, etc). Most of the traffic can be attributed to information campaigns targeting different agendas according to the hashtags or quotations used. Kalita analysed those campaigns from the traffic manipulation standpoint and concluded that approximately 30% of them have signs of artificial amplification via bots and trolls.

According to Kalita, the source of this disinformation about vaccines is a broad range of groups including generic MAGA/Q-anon accounts, UK and US covid-deniers and antivaxers, racial extremist groups and a whole host of others, from climate change deniers to Indian commercial bots which spread the disinformation to create traffic or scams (not actually interested in the content itself).