As they get more cryptic, they become harder to understand. Moran said the codes themselves may end up limiting the reach of misinformation. Is coded language effective at spreading misinformation? "So when you make your backup account or your second account, people will immediately go follow it because you have that certain credibility from being censored." "You become a kind of martyr for the cause," Moran said. If an Instagram user’s account is taken down, "that’s almost worn as a badge of honor," she said. Nonetheless, said Moran, the misinformation researcher, efforts to penalize users for spreading misinformation have backfired. It has removed 20 million pieces of COVID-19 misinformation and labeled more than 190 million pieces of COVID-19 content rated by its fact-checking partners, the spokesperson told PolitiFact. "This is exactly what happens when you are enforcing policies against COVID misinformation - people try to find ways to work around those restrictions," a Facebook spokesperson told PolitiFact in a statement.įacebook partners with more than 80 fact-checking organizations around the world, including PolitiFact, to fact-check posts suspected of sharing misinformation. After PolitiFact mentioned the misspelling of COVID-19 with a zero instead of an "O," Twitter said it was working to incorporate "c0vid" into its detection streams.įacebook, for its part, said the appearance of coded language is a sign that its content-moderation systems are working. And it said it’s continuously trying to improve its detection methods to keep up with new coded language tactics. Twitter said in an email to PolitiFact that it tries to catch the codes through its automated detection systems, powered by machine learning. Platforms say their enforcement is working (The post doesn’t make a fact-checkable claim, so it didn’t get a fact-check.) 19 post added a caption saying, "Let’s see if my horrific misspelling of that word prevents that sticker from popping up on the bottom of my post." As of Oct. The Instagram user who tried the spelling "vachscenes" in an Oct. Users also try to prevent a link to Facebook’s COVID-19 information page from showing up on their coronavirus-related posts. And social media users keep inventing new spellings, phrases and visuals to try to outsmart platforms’ moderation efforts and prevent their posts from being flagged with a misinformation label. For example, Facebook flagged and PolitiFact fact-checked a post that intentionally misspelled Comirnaty, the brand name of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, as "Cominarty." Facebook added a "partly false information" banner to that post with the fact-check because it contained inaccurate information about vaccine mandates.īut other posts with more elaborate codes continue to elude detection and spread misinformation. Some posts with coded language and false information do get snared and labeled or removed. They might identify with or trust misinformation more, said Moran, because it’s coming from someone who is also in that "in" group.Ĭan social media platforms and their misinformation detectors recognize this coded language for what it is? People who grasp that a unicorn emoji means "vaccination" and that "swimmers" are vaccinated people are part of an "in" group. "The coded language is effective in that it creates this sense of community," said Rachel Moran, a researcher who studies COVID-19 misinformation at the University of Washington. But to like-minded users, these codes may signal that they are included in a kind of secret society, with its own beliefs and dialect. To people who are sticklers for spelling or confused by odd syntax, they might be a clear sign that the post should be viewed with skepticism. The evasion tactics can make social media posts read like Mad Libs or a rebus puzzle. A Twitter post swaps the "V" in "vax" with the V-shaped symbol for the zodiac sign Aries (♈). Another post, reshared on Reddit, uses a unicorn emoji as a stand-in for vaccines. An Instagram post, for example, covers up parts of the words "vaccinated," "COVID" and "unvaccinated" in the image to try to flummox content-moderation software that picks words out of images. There are anti-vaccination Facebook groups named "Dance Party" and "Dinner Party," NBC News reports, and Instagram users are dubbing vaccinated people "swimmers." The codes can be more cryptic than mere misspellings and wordplay.
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