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In one week, childhood vaccination has more than 270 thousand mentions on Twitter, says FGV

Child vaccination against Covid-19, which started this Monday (17) across the country, has generated discussions and mobilizing many profiles on social networks.

Between January 7th and 14th, more than 270 thousand (277.1 thousand) posts were recorded on Twitter alone. The majority favored the immunization of children aged 5 to 11 years. According to a survey by the Public Policy Analysis Board of Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV/DAPP), 53.1% of the posts were made by groups in favor of vaccination.

The moment of greatest mobilization of the debate ‒with 65,400 tweets‒ was registered on January 11, when messages against the statements of Pastor Silas Malafaia, in which he classified the application of vaccines in children as infanticide, intensified.

In addition to criticizing the evangelical pastor’s statements, the posts in favor of childhood vaccination mention the number of cases and deaths from the disease among children in Brazil, as well as examples from other countries that have already adopted the measure, in defense of vaccination.

The hashtags with the highest engagement in the analyzed period were “#derrubamalafaia” and “#derrubemalafaia”. There were more than 40 thousand (41.4 thousand). Due to pressure from netizens, the platform decided to remove the publication made by Pastor Silas Malafaia from the air.

For the director of FGV/DAPP, Marco Aurélio Ruediger, companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube need to be responsible for the content published on their platforms and create mechanisms to prevent the spread of misinformation.

“These companies need to make clear what their policies are to prevent the spread of misinformation. Posts like the one by Pastor Sillas Malafaia cause irreparable damage and cannot prosper under the false argument of freedom of expression. This is not true. It’s a decoy. It is disinformation” – says Marco Aurélio.

This Monday (17), Twitter released a feature in Brazil to report tweets that contain disinformation. The tool, still in the testing phase, had already been released in the US, South Korea and Australia in August 2021. In addition to Brazil, the tool will be available in Spain and the Philippines.

In a statement, Twitter said the countries were selected “because we want to harvest learnings from a small but geographically diverse range of regions – including those where English is not the first language – before making the tool available globally.”

Reference: CNN Brasil

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