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- BBC News World
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Facebook groups use the carrot emoji to evade the automatic moderation of anti-vaccine content.
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The BBC has observed several groups, including one with hundreds of thousands of members, in which this orange emoji appears instead of the word “vaccine”.
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Facebook’s algorithms tend to focus on words rather than images.
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In these types of groups, unverified information is shared about people who have been harmed or died from vaccines.
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Eliminated and regenerated
Once the BBC alerted Meta, Facebook’s parent company, those groups were removed.
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“We removed this group for violating ours harmful disinformation policies and we will review any other similar content in accordance with this policy. We continue to work closely with public health experts and the UK government to further address misinformation about the COVID vaccine, ”the company said in a statement.
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The groups, on the other hand, they reappeared in our research ever since.
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One of them had been around for three years, but was rebranded to focus on vaccine stories in August 2022 (previously it was dedicated to sharing “jokes, bets and funny videos”).
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The rules of the largest group of all state: “use keywords for everything”.
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And they add: “Never use words starting with c, vor”: covid, vaccine or booster.
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It was created over a year ago and has over 250,000 members.
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Marc Owen-Jones, a disinformation researcher and associate professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, was invited to participate.
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“They were people who told stories of family members who had died shortly after receiving the covid-19 vaccine,” he said.
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“But instead of the words ‘covid-19’ or ‘vaccine’ they used carrot emojis.”
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“At first I was a bit confused. And then I realized they were used to evade, or at least try, Facebook’s fake news detection algorithms “.
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Risk moderation
In 2021, data from the UK Bureau of Statistics estimated one in five risk of dying from the covid vaccine, compared to 35,000 deaths from the disease of every five million infected without vaccination.
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Tech giants use algorithms to scour their platforms for malicious content.
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But these are especially prepared for detect words and textsHannah Rose Kirk said in a blog for the Oxford Internet Institute.
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Rose Kirk was part of a research group that created a tool called HatemojiCheck – a checklist for identifying areas where artificial intelligence (AI) systems don’t handle things well. abuse in the use of emojis.
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“Despite having an impressive understanding of how language works, AI language models have seen very few emojis,” he said.
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“They are trained with countless books, articles, websites, and even the entire English Wikipedia, but these texts rarely include emojis.”
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image source, Getty Images
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Hidden in plain sight
Emojis can have multiple meanings in addition to those officially declared by Unicode, the consortium that manages them.
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The US Drug Enforcement Agency has issued a warning about how they can be used emoji to talk about illegal drugs.
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And social media platforms have already been criticized for not blocking or removing monkey and banana emojis when posted as racist expressions in the accounts of black players.
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“It’s a modern form of steganography: writing and hiding a message in plain sight but in such a way that, unless you know where to look, no if there“said Professor Alan Woodward, a computer security expert at the University of Surrey.
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“What this all demonstrates is the futility of trying to automate content moderation to prevent ‘harmful’ material from being shared,” he explained, as people “develop new resources to communicate with.”
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Facebook announced last year that it did removed more than 20 million content with misinformation about covid-19 or the vaccine since the start of the pandemic.
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He also claimed to have deleted content stating that vaccines in general are more dangerous than the disease they protect against or that they are toxic.
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The President of the United States, Joe Biden, criticized the tech giants for not doing enough to address the spread of false information about vaccines online.
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He said he hoped Facebook would do more to combat the “outrageous misinformation” about coronavirus vaccines spread on its platform.
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