On March 24, 2021, we issued our report that disinformation does...and that showed that 12 super-spreaders of disinformation were responsible for 65% of the content shared on social media that was undermining confidence in the vaccine. That might sound extraordinary, that 12 people can be responsible for so much of the disinformation, but it's because they're not just individuals; they're often 501(c)(3) or they're limited companies with a front person that are producing the highest quality material.
If you think about the impact that just one British man, Andrew Wakefield, had on the take-up of the MMR vaccine, it then becomes understandable that a small number of highly motivated, highly talented spreaders of misinformation are able to cause so much damage.
This is what happened with that. On the same day that the report came out, Mark Zuckerberg was in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the U.S. Congress. He said that he would take action on it. The President asked him in June, he said, "Look, these people are killers, you've got to take action. Think about if your relative was one of the people who was receiving this information”. Even then, only 50% of their accounts and their followers have been taken down.
With the example of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., they took down one of his accounts on Instagram but not the accounts on Facebook, which is an extraordinary failure. What we've seen is piecemeal enforcement, even when they are identifiable super-spreaders of harm. They are not just super-spreaders of harm, they're super-violators of their own community standards. It just goes to show that they're more addicted to the profits that come with attention than they are to doing the right thing.