A Disinformation Actor’s Responses to Deplatforming from Facebook

And the final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Victoria O’Meara, whose focus is on the anti-vaccine ‘Children’s Health Defense’ group, founded in 2016 and directed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. until 2013; it is a key driver of health-related mis- and disinformation campaigns in the context COVID-19 and beyond.

CHD was identified as a key disinformation superspreader by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and removed from Facebook and Instagram in August 2022 for repeatedly violating its terms of service on misinformation and conspiracy theories. RFK Jr. was similarly deplatforming, but has been reinstated following his nomination as an independent candidate for the US Presidency.

In response to this deplatforming, CHD launched its own Telegram channel in March 2021; this has some 63,000 subscribers by now, and posts around one message per day. This study examined all 6,600 posts to date, and the way these posts articulated and operationalised CHD’s marginal status. Using the Communalytic tool, several key themes emerged: centrally, some 200 posts addressed social media censorship directed against CHD.

A further manual analysis of these posts showed that such censorship was positioned as a badge of honour and sign of credibility for the organisation; that posts cultivated a politics of crisis and highlighted threats to freedom of speech and other fundamental democratic rights; that they claimed elite collusion and corruption involving government institutions and technology companies; that Big Tech in general posed threats to personal autonomy, privacy, and security, and especially to children’s mental health; and that posts also called their audience to unite and join the fight against such perceived conspiracies.

Such posts also few substantially from quotes, snippets of speeches, and other sources that were presented with little contextualisation. The overall effect is to construct an image of ‘the people’, as represented by the unifying voice of CHD. This might be understood as cultivating a kind of reactionary health populism; CHD’S deplatforming increases its authority and legitimacy amongst its supporters.