Study discovered several accounts, now known to belong to the same Russian trolls who interfered in the US election, tweeting about vaccines 
 
 Bots and Russian trolls spread misinformation about vaccines on Twitter to sow division and distribute malicious content before and during the American presidential election, according to a new study. 
 
 Scientists at George Washington University, in Washington DC, made the discovery while trying to improve social media communications for public health workers, researchers said. Instead, they found trolls and bots skewing online debate and upending consensus about vaccine safety. 
 
 The study discovered several accounts, now known to belong to the same Russian trolls who interfered in the US election, as well as marketing and malware bots, tweeting about vaccines. 
 
 
 
 Russian trolls played both sides, the researchers said, tweeting pro- and anti-vaccine content in a politically charged context. 
 
 “These trolls seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society,” Mark Dredze, a team member and professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins, which was also involved in the study, said. 
 
 “By playing both sides, they erode public trust in vaccination, exposing us all to the risk of infectious diseases. Viruses don’t respect national boundaries.” 
 
 The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, comes as Europe faces one of the largest measles outbreaks in decades, one which has been partly attributed to falling vaccination rates. In the first six months of 2018, there were 41,000 cases of measles across the continent, more than in the entirety of 2017. Meanwhile, the rate of children not receiving vaccines for non-medical reasons is climbing in the US. 
 
 “The vast majority of Americans believe vaccines are safe and effective, but looking at Twitter gives the impression that there is a lot of debate,” said David Broniatowski, an assistant professor in George Washington’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. 
 
 “It turns out that many anti-vaccine tweets come from accounts whose provenance is unclear. These might be bots, human users or ‘cyborgs’ – hacked accounts that are sometimes taken over by bots. Although it’s impossible to know exactly how many tweets were generated by bots and trolls, our findings suggest that a significant portion of the online discourse about vaccines may be generated by malicious actors with a range of hidden agendas.” 
 
 Russian trolls appeared to link vaccination to controversial issues in the US. Their vaccine-related content made appeals to God, or argued about race, class and animal welfare, researchers said. Often, the tweets targeted the legitimacy of the US government. 
 
 
 
 “Did you know there was secret government database of #Vaccine-damaged child? #VaccinateUS,” read one Russian troll tweet. Another said: “#VaccinateUS You can’t fix stupidity. Let them die from measles, and I’m for #vaccination!” 
 
 “Whereas bots that spread malware and unsolicited content disseminated anti-vaccine messages, Russian trolls promoted discord,” researchers concluded. “Accounts masquerading as legitimate users create false equivalency, eroding public consensus on vaccination.” 
 
 Measles is on the rise in Europe – and populism could be to blame | Sarah Boseley Read more 
 
 Researchers examined a random sample of 1.7m tweets collected between July 2014 and September 2017 – the height of the American presidential campaign that led to Donald Trump’s victory. To identify bots, researchers compared the rate at which normal users tweeted about vaccines with the rate at which bots and trolls did so. 
 
 “We started looking at the Russian trolls, because that data set became available in January,” said Broniatowski. “One of the first things that came out was they tweet about vaccines way more often than the average Twitter user.” 
 
 Broniatowski said trolls tweeted about vaccines about 22 times more often than regular Twitter users, or about once every 550 tweets, versus every 12,000 tweets for human accounts. 
 
 Researchers found different kinds of bots spread different kinds of misinformation. So-called “content polluters” used anti-vaccine messages as bait to entice their followers to click on advertisements and links to malicious websites. 
 
 The study comes as social media companies struggle to clean their houses of misinformation. In February, Twitter deleted 3,800 accounts linked to the Russian government-backed Internet Research Agency, the same group researchers at George Washington examined. In April, Facebook removed 135 accounts linked to the same organization. 
 
 This week, Facebook removed another 650 fake accounts linked to Russia and Iran meant to spread misinformation. Researchers did not study Facebook, though it remains a hub of anti-vaccination activity. 
 
 “To me it’s actually impressive how well-organized and sophisticated the anti-vax movement has become,” said Dr Peter Hotez, the director of the Texas children’s hospital center for vaccine development at Baylor College of Medicine, and the father of an autistic child. Hotez, who maintains an active Twitter presence, said he struggled to identify whether Twitter accounts were human or bots. 
 
 “There are clearly some well-known anti-vax activists that I know to look out for and I know to block or to mute, but that’s a minority,” said Hotez. “A lot of it just seems to come out of nowhere, and I’m always surprised by that.” 
 
 Q&A What is net neutrality? Show Hide Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers (ISPs) treat everyone’s data equally – whether that’s an email from your mother, a bank transfer or a streamed episode of The Handmaid’s Tale. It means that ISPs don’t get to choose which data is sent more quickly, and which sites get blocked or throttled (for example, slowing the delivery of a TV show because it is streamed by a video company that competes with a subsidiary of the ISP) and who has to pay extra. For this reason, some have described net neutrality as the “first amendment of the internet”. 
 
 
 
 One of the most striking findings, Broniatowski said, was an apparent attempt by Russian trolls to Astroturf a vaccine debate using the hashtag #VaccinateUS. Accounts identified as controlled by the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm backed by the Russian government, were almost exclusively responsible for content emerging under #VaccinateUS. 
 
 Some of the Russian trolls even specifically used a hashtag associated with Andrew Wakefield, the discredited former physician who published fraudulent papers linking vaccines with autism, such as #Vaxxed and #CDCWhistleblower. 
 
 What do Russian trolls fear most? Transparency | Paul Chadwick Read more 
 
 The Guardian requested comment from Twitter and was referred to a blogpost in which the company said its “focus is increasingly on proactively identifying problematic accounts”, and that its system “identified and challenged” more than 9.9m potential spam accounts a week in May 2018. ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Why has there been a measles outbreak in Europe? 
 
 Social media bots and Russian trolls have been spreading disinformation about vaccines on Twitter to create social discord and distribute malware, US researchers say. 
 
 Troll accounts that had attempted to influence the US election had also been tweeting about vaccines, a study says. 
 
 Many posted both pro- and anti-vaccination messages to create "false equivalency", the study found. 
 
 It examined thousands of tweets sent between 2014 and 2017. 
 
 Vaccination was being used by trolls and sophisticated bots as a "wedge issue", said Mark Dredze from Johns Hopkins University. 
 
 "By playing both sides, they erode public trust in vaccination, exposing us all to the risk of infectious diseases," he said. 
 
 Earlier this month, the World Health Organization (WHO) said cases of measles in Europe had hit a record high, with experts blaming this surge in infections on a drop in the number of people being vaccinated. 
 
 In the US, the number of children being exempted from immunisation for religious or philosophical reasons is also rising, research published in June found. 
 
 While a majority of Americans believed vaccines were safe and effective, looking at Twitter gave a different impression and suggested that there was a lot of debate about the issue, the disinformation study, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health, said. 
 
 "A significant portion of the online discourse about vaccines may be generated by malicious actors with a range of hidden agendas," said David Broniatowski from George Washington University. 
 
 The researchers reviewed more than 250 tweets about vaccination from accounts linked to the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA). In February the agency was named in a US indictment over alleged election meddling. 
 
 The IRA tweets used polarising language and linked vaccination to controversial statements about race, class and government legitimacy, the researchers said. 
 
 One tweet casting doubt on vaccines that was cited in the study read: "Did you know there was secret government database of #Vaccine-damaged child? #VaccinateUS". 
 
 Another that argued for vaccinations said: "#VaccinateUS You can't fix stupidity. Let them die from measles, and I'm for #vaccination!" 
 
 Meanwhile less sophisticated "content polluters" - bot accounts that distribute malware, unsolicited commercial content and disruptive materials - shared anti-vaccination messages much more frequently than average Twitter users, using them as "bait" to get people to click on links to malicious websites. 
 
 Social media companies are struggling to find ways to combat disinformation on their platforms. 
 
 Earlier this week Facebook and Twitter said they had suspended or removed accounts linked to Iran and Russia over "inauthentic" or "manipulating" behaviour. 
 
 In July Twitter was reported to have shut down up to 70m fake and suspicious accounts. 
 
 Health cost of vaccination 'debate' 
 
 Despite science overwhelmingly and indisputably advocating in favour of immunisation, a growing number of parents around the world are resisting medical advice by going their own way. 
 
 Some base their decision on discredited research 20 years ago that erroneously linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) to autism. 
 
 But health officials say the number of people getting the disease measles is rising because of a fall in vaccinations. 
 
 In Europe more than 41,000 people were infected with measles in the first six months of 2018 - nearly double the number of cases for the whole of last year - leading to 37 deaths. 
 
 High rates of measles were seen in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia and Greece. 
 
 In the US the number of children being exempted from vaccines is also rising. 
 
 In Italy, the upper house of parliament has voted through legislation to abolish the law that makes vaccination mandatory for children before they start school. The amendment will mean parents of unvaccinated children will no longer face fines. ||||| “Don’t get #vaccines. Illuminati are behind it.” 
 
 “Do you still treat your kids with leaves? No? And why don’t you #vaccinate them? It’s medicine!” 
 
 With messages like those, Russian internet trolls meddling in the 2016 presidential election also lashed out at Americans debating the safety of vaccines, a new study has found. 
 
 But instead of picking a side, researchers said, the trolls and bots they programmed hurled insults at both pro- and anti-vaccine advocates. Their only intent, the study concluded, seemed to be to raise the level of hostility. 
 
 “You see this pattern,” said David A. Broniatowski , a computer engineer at George Washington University and lead author of the study, which was published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health. “On guns, or race, these accounts take opposite sides in lots of debates. They’re about sowing discord.”
– You might think twice about heading to Twitter or Facebook to read about vaccinations. "A significant portion of the online discourse about vaccines may be generated by malicious actors with a range of hidden agendas," says George Washington University's David Broniatowski, author of a new study calling out Russian trolls for seeking to polarize Americans on the issue during 2016 election meddling. Already known to have stirred up issues relating to guns and race, Russia-linked Twitter accounts sent more than 250 tweets offering a pro- or anti-vaccine stance between 2014 and 2017, the BBC reports, citing the study published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health. Those identified as trolls tweeted about vaccines 22 times more often than regular Twitter users, according to the study, which notes that #VaccinateUS was "uniquely identified with Russian troll accounts associated with the [Kremlin's] Internet Research Agency," per the Guardian and New York Times. "You can't fix stupidity. Let them die from measles, and I'm for #vaccination!" one such tweet read. "Don’t get #vaccines. Illuminati are behind it," read another. "By playing both sides, they erode public trust in vaccination, exposing us all to the risk of infectious diseases," says researcher Mark Dredze. But the tweets are really about sowing discord, says Broniatowski, noting that many IRA-linked tweets about vaccines also mentioned, race, class, and the US government. (Expect something similar as the midterms approach.)