How Amazon became an engine for anti-vaccine conspiracy theories

Search for “vaccines” on Amazon’s bookstore, and a banner encourages shoppers to “learn more” about COVID-19, with a link to the Centers for Disease Control. But the text almost vanishes amid the eye-catching book covers spreading out below, many of which carry Amazon’s orange “bestseller” badge. One top-ranked book that promises “the other side of the story” of vaccine science is #1 on Amazon’s list for “Health Policy.” Next to it, smiling infants grace the cover of the top-selling book in “Teen Health,” co-authored by an Oregon pediatrician whose license was suspended last year over an approach to vaccinations that placed “many of his patients at serious risk of harm.” Anyone Who Tells You That Vaccines Are Safe and Effective Is Lying , by a prominent English conspiracy theorist, promises “the facts about vaccination — so that you can make up your own mind.” There are no warning notices or fact checks—studies have shown no link between vaccines and autism, for instance—but there are over 1,700 five-star ratings and a badge: the book is #1 on Amazon’s list for “Children’s Vaccination & Immunization.” Offered by small publishers or self-published through Amazon’s platform, the books rehearse the falsehoods and conspiracy theories that fuel vaccine opposition, steepening the impact of the pandemic and slowing a global recovery. They also illustrate how the world’s biggest store has become a megaphone for anti-vaccine activists, medical misinformers, and conspiracy theorists, pushing dangerous falsehoods in a medium that carries more apparent legitimacy than just a tweet. “Without question, Amazon is one of the greatest single promoters of anti-vaccine disinformation, and the world leader in pushing fake anti-vaccine and COVID-19 conspiracy books,” says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at the Baylor College of Medicine. For years, journalists and researchers have warned of the ways fraudsters, extremists, and conspiracy theorists use Amazon to earn cash and attention. To Hotez, who has devoted much of his career to educating the public about vaccines, the real-world consequences aren’t academic. In the US and elsewhere, he says, vaccination efforts are now up against a growing ecosystem of activist groups, foreign manipulators, and digital influencers who “peddle fake books on Amazon.” Anti-vaccine titles dominate search results for “vaccines”; the first autocomplete suggestion is “vaccines are dangerous” (Amazon) Letting the truth loose The Seattle giant is known for a relatively minimalist approach to policing content. The goal, founder Jeff Bezos said in 1998, was “to make every book available—the good, the bad and the ugly.” Customer reviews would “let truth loose.” Amazon’s algorithms and recommendation boxes would make it a place where, as it says on its website, “customers can find everything they need and want.” These days, they can publish everything they want, too: Amazon’s self-publishing platforms allow authors to make paper books, audio books, or e-books. The latter, Amazon says , “takes less than five minutes and your book appears on Kindle stores worldwide within 24–48 hours.” Gradually, Amazon has taken a tougher approach to content moderation, and to a seemingly ceaseless onslaught of counterfeits, fraud, defective products, and toxic speech. The company says its automated and human reviewers now evaluate thousands of products a day to ensure they abide by its offensive content policies . For books, its prohibitions are brief and vague: material “that we determine is hate speech, promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, advocates terrorism, or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive.” Sometimes that includes health misinformation. In 2019, the company removed a number of titles that connected autism to vaccines after Rep. Adam Schiff wrote to Bezos to say he was concerned Amazon was “surfacing and recommending products and content that discourage parents from vaccinating their children,” citing “strong evidence” that vaccine misinformation had helped fuel a deadly measles epidemic in Washington that year. After the start of the pandemic, Amazon removed over one million fraudulent products related to COVID-19, including “cures” like herbal treatments, prayer healing, and vitamin supplements. It also pulled an unknown number of books that pushed pandemic conspiracy theories, and added banners linking customers to credible information for some search terms. January 6 led to another purge across Big Tech, and Amazon also pulled alt-right and QAnon merchandise for breaking its rules on hate speech. Later that month, it removed dozens of books promoting Holocaust denial, and finally removed the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries . It even banned Parler from its cloud service, citing the right-wing social network’s lax content moderation. Despite its sweeps, however, Amazon is still flooded with misinformation, and helping amplify it too: A series of recent studies and a review by Fast Company show the bookstore is boosting misinformation around health-related terms like “autism” or “covid,” and nudging customers toward a universe of other conspiracy theory books. Read More …

Would you bet on sports through your TV? FuboTV is trying to find out

FuboTV subscribers might notice something new this week when they tune into the service’s South American World Cup qualifier coverage. Inside FuboTV’s Roku and Android apps, viewers will be able to pull up a dashboard of live stats by scrolling up on the video stream. From there, they’ll get to answer a handful of quiz questions—for instance, “which team will score first in the second half?”—for a chance to win a free year of Fubo’s service, which normally costs $65 per month. This may seem gimmicky, but Fubo says it’s part of a bigger plan to let people bet on games through their televisions. Fubo plans to launch a sportsbook in the fourth quarter of this year, but by starting with something a little lighter, Fubo is hoping to figure out how much interaction people want from their TV screens and which users would be inclined to bet real money as well. “Our hypothesis is that it’s going to be an engagement driver, but also in the bigger picture, it’s kind of our first step towards our overall gaming strategy,” says Mike Berkley, FuboTV’s chief product officer. FuboTV is one of many companies in the TV business that sees gambling as a potential cash cow, especially as the rising cost of sports and a declining pay-TV audience threatens the traditional channel bundle business. Still, betting on games remains illegal in many states, and Fubo is a fairly small streaming service. Its only choice right now is to move slowly as it builds its audience and pushes for more legalized sports betting. More contests to come For now, FuboTV’s live stats and contests are beta features limited to the Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol (CONMEBOL) qualifiers, to which Fubo has the exclusive streaming rights . And while the live stats will also be available on Fire TV devices in the coming days, the contests will only appear on Roku players and Android mobile devices to start. But Fubo plans to expand on both fronts over time. Contest support is coming soon to Fire TV, Android TV, iOS, and the web, and Fubo is aiming to bring contests out of beta in time for football season in the fall. The service could eventually add contests for other types of content beyond sports as well. “Think of this really as a platform feature, where we can create a more enhanced viewing experience for every kind of content we provide on the platform,” he says. David Gandler, FuboTV’s cofounder and CEO, also floats the idea of using contests as an advertising tool, with companies offering a chance to win a car or free pizza. It will also collect data on which viewers are most interested in contests, hoping to turn them on to betting once Fubo’s sportsbook launches Read More …

Would you bet on sports through your TV? FuboTV is trying to find out

FuboTV subscribers might notice something new this week when they tune into the service’s South American World Cup qualifier coverage. Inside FuboTV’s Roku and Android apps, viewers will be able to pull up a dashboard of live stats by scrolling up on the video stream. From there, they’ll get to answer a handful of quiz questions—for instance, “which team will score first in the second half?”—for a chance to win a free year of Fubo’s service, which normally costs $65 per month. This may seem gimmicky, but Fubo says it’s part of a bigger plan to let people bet on games through their televisions. Fubo plans to launch a sportsbook in the fourth quarter of this year, but by starting with something a little lighter, Fubo is hoping to figure out how much interaction people want from their TV screens and which users would be inclined to bet real money as well. “Our hypothesis is that it’s going to be an engagement driver, but also in the bigger picture, it’s kind of our first step towards our overall gaming strategy,” says Mike Berkley, FuboTV’s chief product officer. FuboTV is one of many companies in the TV business that sees gambling as a potential cash cow, especially as the rising cost of sports and a declining pay-TV audience threatens the traditional channel bundle business. Still, betting on games remains illegal in many states, and Fubo is a fairly small streaming service. Its only choice right now is to move slowly as it builds its audience and pushes for more legalized sports betting. More contests to come For now, FuboTV’s live stats and contests are beta features limited to the Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol (CONMEBOL) qualifiers, to which Fubo has the exclusive streaming rights . And while the live stats will also be available on Fire TV devices in the coming days, the contests will only appear on Roku players and Android mobile devices to start. But Fubo plans to expand on both fronts over time. Contest support is coming soon to Fire TV, Android TV, iOS, and the web, and Fubo is aiming to bring contests out of beta in time for football season in the fall. The service could eventually add contests for other types of content beyond sports as well. “Think of this really as a platform feature, where we can create a more enhanced viewing experience for every kind of content we provide on the platform,” he says. David Gandler, FuboTV’s cofounder and CEO, also floats the idea of using contests as an advertising tool, with companies offering a chance to win a car or free pizza Read More …

Having trouble focusing? This service pairs you with a remote work buddy

Sometimes we need another person—even a largely silent one—to help us reach our goals. Focusing on tasks intensely enough to make progress is hard enough during normal times. It’s been even tougher as our homes have become both a castle and a prison over the last year. Some of us thrive best in an environment with accountability or collegiality. In a workplace, we may have the thrum of people or the occasional stare of a boss. At home, not so much. Read More …

Having trouble focusing? This service pairs you with a remote work buddy

Sometimes we need another person—even a largely silent one—to help us reach our goals. Focusing on tasks intensely enough to make progress is hard enough during normal times. It’s been even tougher as our homes have become both a castle and a prison over the last year. Some of us thrive best in an environment with accountability or collegiality. In a workplace, we may have the thrum of people or the occasional stare of a boss. At home, not so much. A service called Focusmate addresses the challenges of working alone by pairing people to perform separate tasks at the same time in companionable silence during a video call, with each worker being aware that they’re in the virtual presence of someone else. In effect, it gives people who work from home some of the value of toiling among others, in on-demand form. Focusmate is modeled after body doubling , a form of personal task accountability that’s common in circles of people who have trouble focusing and may have a self-diagnosis or professional diagnosis of ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder). A body double is another person who has a set of tasks to get done, and you agree to pair your unrelated tasks with each other for a short period of time to provide external reinforcement. Setting up body doubling without an in-person component or trusted friends or colleagues can be tricky. You need to find a partner, set the rules, and make sure you both have time at the right time. And if you know someone too well, you can easily slip into the procrastination mode that led you to seek help in the first place. Focusmate connects two people via video, but it’s about focused work in someone else’s presence, not chatting, [Image: Focusmate] “If I were to do this with one of my classmates or colleagues, we [would] certainly spend some larger percentage of our time in chat or discussion, and less-than-focused work,” says Lynn D. Warner, an ADHD/executive-function coach who recently finished her training and relied on Focusmate for studying. “Working with a stranger is much more productive for that reason.” (Warner, my spouse, first alerted me to Focusmate after finding it invaluable.) Focusmate’s matchmaking eliminates all the pain points and friction while still making a human and humane connection. The service answers the questions posed by its founder, Taylor Jacobson: “How can you combine just the ingredients of providing structure, providing accountability, providing human connection and camaraderie and team spirit?” The service sets ground rules to keep chat to a minimum and stresses safety and trust to minimize the possibility of abusive incidents. Users must register even to use the free tier, which allows you to book three 50-minute sessions each week. Those who pay $5 per month have unlimited access Read More …