Children’s Health Defense (CHD) last week was the focus of a presentation delivered at the International Conference on Social Media & Society in London during a session on “misinformation.”
During the presentation — “Deplatforming Children’s Health Defense: Fighting Health Misinformation or Building a Reactionary Health Populism Movement?” — Victoria O’Meara, Ph.D., a lecturer on digital media at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, accused CHD of spreading “dangerous” information about vaccines and other public health topics.
The presentation research, yet to be published, provided background on CHD’s organizational history and online content and focused on content posted on the CHD Telegram channel between 2021 and 2023.
Co-authors who were not present at the conference include:
- Jaigris Hodson, Ph.D., an associate professor of digital communication for the public interest at Royal Roads University (Canada).
- Anatoliy Gruzd, Ph.D., professor of privacy-preserving digital technologies at Toronto Metropolitan University (Canada).
- Philip Mai, Ph.D., senior researcher and co-director of the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University.
- Esteban Morales, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at Royal Roads University.
- Joan Owen, a Ph.D. student at Royal Roads University and a member of the “Polarization Team” at the Cascade Institute.
O’Meara’s, Hodson’s and Gruzd’s research interests include the spread of “misinformation,” while Morales’ research interests include “online violence.”
In 2022, Hodson and O’Meara co-authored an academic paper, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, examining COVID-19 health-sharing practices on social media.
The 2022 paper concluded that “misinformation researchers need to do more to educate the public about the inefficacy of debunking and the importance of being pre-emptive in spreading credible information” and that “communicators who wish to counter health misinformation” should “try to appeal to those people and platforms that are more likely to serve a broadcast function within a larger community.”
Other presentations during Wednesday’s panel also focused on the spread of supposed “misinformation” and so-called “conspiracy theories,” and how Bill Gates has been a frequent target of such narratives.
Presentation claims CHD spreads ‘health misinformation’
O’Meara presented background information on CHD, including that it was founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., currently CHD’s chairman on leave. She described the organization as “one of the largest anti-vaccine groups in the U.S., known for spreading health misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
“It’s an organization that is known for propagating medical misinformation, anti-vaccine rhetoric and conspiracy theories, generally all under the banner of Vaccine Choice and Health Freedom Movement,” O’Meara said.
“To give you sort of an example of the scale of this [a 2020 study] found that about 54% of the anti-vaccine advertising that was found on Facebook came specifically from this organization,” she added.
O’Meara noted that CHD and RFK Jr. were named as part of “The Disinformation Dozen,” a list produced by the Center for Countering Digital Hate of the 12 “superspreaders” of COVID-19 “misinformation.”
Evidence uncovered in First Amendment lawsuits against the Biden administration and as part of the “Twitter Files” revealed that the “Disinformation Dozen” list was used by the federal government to target the named individuals for censorship.
“CHD was removed from Facebook and Instagram in August 2022 for repeatedly violating their terms of service and spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories related to COVID-19 and other health topics,” O’Meara said. She noted that Kennedy “has since been reinstated because he is running as an independent for president” of the U.S.
According to O’Meara, “the way that Facebook is navigating some of those tensions between being a public figure who the public has or should be able to access and understand their ideas and someone who is very deeply enmeshed in [the] spreading of misinformation that’s quite dangerous” is “interesting.”
O’Meara said it is “challenging” for social media platforms “to identify and delineate” so-called “medical misinformation” because “unlike other things [such as] violent rhetoric et cetera, the effects or the imminent bodily harm to people is much delayed. And so, it can be a difficult one for platforms to identify and delineate as dangerous.”
CHD accused of fostering ‘reactionary health populist movement’
Focusing on CHD’s Telegram channel, O’Meara noted that it launched in March 2021 — “in the same month that this organization was named as part of the ‘Disinformation Dozen’” — and numbered over 63,000 subscribers at the time of her analysis.
The researchers analyzed 6,654 posts made between March 2021 and September 2023.
O’Meara sought to examine how “the deplatforming of the CHD and the ‘regulatory turn’ … of social media” is “understood and discussed by the CHD itself,” and how “the marginal status of this organization [is] articulated and operationalized.”
“We ran a topic analysis first … to identify those key thematic discussion points, and this is sort of where we identified social media censorship and … Big Tech as sort of an internally significant topic point for this particular account,” O’Meara said, referring to CHD’s Telegram channel. “That’s what the rest of the study is borne out of.”
O’Meara said her analysis led to the identification of five key themes that CHD purportedly disseminates in communications via its Telegram channel, one of those being that the censorship CHD has faced is used as a “credential” by the organization.
“Deplatforming and censorship [are] understood as a reason to listen [to CHD], a badge of honor, a statement of credibility,” O’Meara’s presentation read. “The deplatforming of CHD is sort of more broadly understood as a reason for audience members to listen to what they have to say.”
“In this space, censorship is kind of brandished as a credential that lends the organization … legitimacy or authority,” O’Meara said.
O’Meara also identified a theme she referred to as “politics of crisis,” which she described as a sense of urgency cultivated by CHD “where democracy and fundamental rights are lost or in peril.”
“I’m thinking about this as cultivating this sort of idea that there is imminent threat to democracy and freedom of speech and fundamental values and that the deplatforming of this organization is evidence of that,” O’Meara said.
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“Their censorship or their being moderated or removed from the platform [is] being centered towards the claims that they make more broadly [that it] is evidence of the decline of democracy, the removal of fundamental rights for people.”
The third theme O’Meara identified was “elite collusion and corruption,” which she said describes CHD’s efforts to highlight “links between government and technology companies” and “powerful actors serving elite interests and censoring truth.”
O’Meara said this theme “comes up again and again” in CHD’s communications.
Another theme O’Meara identified focused less on Big Tech censorship and more on “a repetitive insistence on Big Tech’s … general threats to personal autonomy and privacy and those sorts of things,” including surveillance, data capture and social media’s harms to children’s health.
O’Meara also discussed what she described as “expressions of a community sentiment and calls to action.” O’Meara said threats against CHD are “mobilized” by the organization as “calls to action” from supporters and the public.
According to O’Meara, CHD messaging across these five themes relies “frequently on quotes, small snippets of dialogue from speeches, posts or content from a wide variety of people in different roles, from different contexts, or with little information about the context.”
“A lot of their content kind of quotes … people in reputable [positions] and positions of power. And the overall effect of that … is to construct this image of ‘The People,’ with CHD as its voice,” O’Meara said.
“CHD is engaging, cultivating a reactionary health populist movement where the deplatforming and censorship of this organization has kind of become a key narrative device that is operationalized towards increasing their authority and legitimacy, but also to elevating the importance of the work that they do,” O’Meara continued.
O’Meara said this “has interesting consequences for understanding how … we combat problems like medical misinformation.”
Responding to an audience member’s question, she said it is “not so easily black and white” to say that all information CHD disseminates is “misinformation,” but that it is precisely this that makes the organization “quite dangerous.”
Responding to another question, O’Meara acknowledged that social media content moderation is “a blunt tool” that “is always embedded socially and culturally in a way that can be volatile.”
However, it is also a “necessary” tool that should “be part of a broader toolbox that needs to involve policy, that needs to involve educators,” she said.
“I think moderation has a role to play but it gets very murky when we’re no longer talking about objective facts,” O’Meara said. “We need a multifaceted approach.”
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‘Conspiracy theories’ targeting Gates connected to ‘public health hazards’
Other presentations during the July 17 panel focused on different aspects of so-called “misinformation” and the spread of “conspiracy theories” online.
One presentation, “‘My First Thought was Africa’: Gates Foundation as a Floating Signifier in Global COVID-19 Philanthropy Discussions on Twitter,” focused on Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as proverbial lightning rods for both COVID-19 vaccine proponents and opponents online.
Kateryna Kasianenko, a Ph.D. candidate at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, stated in the presentation, “Highly visible figures such as Gates are targets of falsehoods/dis/misinformation/conspiracies,” adding that these “tendencies intensified post-COVID-19.”
According to Kasianenko, “falsehoods regarding these figures are a symptom of lack of fixity of meaning behind their philanthropy in global online discourses.”
This “lack of fixity” was characterized as a “floating signifier,” where a figure like Gates can represent different meanings to different communities, which this study sought to examine via an analysis of thousands of tweets from 2020 and 2021 referencing Gates — and his foundation’s — activities in Africa.
Citing academic Claire Wardle, Ph.D. — an academic highlighted in the “Twitter Files” for her role in advising the Biden administration on how to censor COVID-19 counternarratives — Kasianenko said, “Questioning definitions of mis/dis/mal-information” is “atomistic,” where “right-wing/anti-vax communities [are] angered by those associated with the philanthropists,” like Gates.
Such communities also appropriate “post-colonial language” when referring to figures like Gates as “colonialists,” Kasianenko said.
Another presentation during the same panel, “Bots & Humans: The Role of Super Spreaders in the Conspiratorial Infodemic,” also focused on Gates as a figure targeted by so-called “conspiracy theorists” online.
K. Hazel Kwon, Ph.D., associate professor of journalism and mass communication at Arizona State University, stated in the presentation, “Since the COVID-19 outbreak in 2019, the spread of problematic information like fake news and misinformation … has raised serious concerns” and “conspiracy theories” have been “ubiquitous” throughout history due to their “simplicity.”
“Ubiquity does not mean being harmless,” Kwon said, arguing it can lead to “public health hazards like increasing vaccine hesitancy or rejecting scientific consensus.”
Focusing on Gates as a target of “super-spreaders” of “conspiracy theories,” Kwon presented the results of an analysis of thousands of tweets from 2020.
The analysis found that “conspiratorial” tweets referencing Gates peaked on several occasions, such as “[Dr. Anthony] Fauci’s warning against reopening,” “Pfizer’s deal with DOD [Department of Defense] and HHS [Department of Health and Human Services], the Pfizer and J&J [Johnson & Johnson] Phase 3 trials of their COVID-19 vaccines, and the launch of public COVID-19 vaccinations in December 2020.”
Kwon’s analysis found that 59% of the accounts of so-called “super-spreaders” — including three of the top six “super-spreaders” — have since been suspended by Twitter, while an additional 8% “no longer existed.”
Prominent topics that were the subject of tweets by so-called “super-spreaders” included posts linking Gates to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to “vaccine tests in [the] global south,” to the World Economic Forum, to the development of the COVID-19 vaccines, and to the development of “vaccines that modify human DNA.”
The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy, who is on leave from CHD and is running as an independent for president of the U.S.
