Facebook said that Children’s Health Defense, a group led by Mr. Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist, had “repeatedly” violated its guidelines by spreading medical misinformation.Facebook and Instagram on Thursday removed the accounts of Children’s Health Defense, an organization led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that is one of the largest U.S. anti-vaccine groups, for spreading medical misinformation.In an emailed newsletter, Children’s Health Defense said Facebook and Instagram had taken down its accounts after a 30-day ban by the social networks. The nonprofit, which Mr. Kennedy has run since 2018, accused the apps of censorship.“Removing CHD accounts is evidence of a clearly orchestrated attempt to stop the impact we have during a time of heightened criticism of our public health institutions,” the group said.In a statement, Mr. Kennedy said, “Facebook is acting here as a surrogate for the Federal government’s crusade to silence all criticism of draconian government policies.”Children’s Health Defense is widely regarded as a symbol of the vaccine resistance movement. Last year, the organization was named one of the “Disinformation Dozen,” which refers to the top 12 superspreaders of misinformation about Covid-19 on the internet, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate.Read More on Facebook and MetaA New Name: In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would change its name to Meta, as part of a wider strategy shift toward the so-called metaverse that aims at introducing people to shared virtual worlds.Morphing Into Meta: Mr. Zuckerberg is setting a relentless pace as he leads the company into the next phase. But the pivot  is causing internal disruption and uncertainty.Zuckerberg’s No. 2: In June, Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief financing officer announced she would step down from Meta, depriving Mr. Zuckerberg of his top deputy.Tough Times Ahead: After years of financial strength, the company is now grappling with upheaval in the global economy, a blow to its advertising business and a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit.Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said it removed the main accounts of Children’s Health Defense because the group had “repeatedly” violated the company’s policies on medical misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic. Children’s Health Defense said that in total, it had more than half a million followers on its main Facebook and Instagram pages.Facebook’s and Instagram’s actions are a blow to Mr. Kennedy, who is the son of the former senator and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. But the account removals do not completely block him from speaking online. While Mr. Kennedy was personally barred from Instagram in February 2021, his personal Facebook page — with nearly 247,000 followers — is still up.Other Facebook pages dedicated to Children’s Health Defense, including those of its California, Florida and Arizona chapters, also remain online and have thousands of followers, according to a review by The New York Times.Over the course of the pandemic, Children’s Health Defense has repeatedly questioned the safety of Covid-19 vaccines, falsely saying that the vaccines cause organ damage and harm pregnant women. The organization has also tried sowing doubt about other kinds of vaccines. Over the last two months, it claimed that vaccines for tetanus caused infertility and that polio vaccines were responsible for a global rise in polio cases.Meta has policies forbidding medical misinformation but has struggled with how to enforce them. The company has had over a dozen discussions about removing the accounts of Children’s Health Defense from Facebook and Instagram over the last year, said two people with knowledge of the conversations, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly.Last month, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, wrote an open letter about the company’s medical misinformation policies. He said its strict policies about Covid-19 misinformation, which were put in place at the start of the pandemic, might need to be reconsidered as many parts of the world returned to normal.Before the pandemic, Meta removed only posts that could “contribute to a risk of imminent physical harm,” Mr. Clegg said. During the pandemic, the company broadened that to remove false claims about “masking, social distancing and the transmissibility of the virus.” Those latter measures may no longer need to stay in place, he suggested.He added that over 25 million pieces of content related to Covid-19 misinformation had been removed since the start of the pandemic.Misinformation experts have said that conspiracy theories and falsehoods about Covid-19 remain prominent on Facebook and Instagram and have continued to attract attention.

ORINDA, Calif. — They waved signs that read “Defeat the mandates” and “No vaccines.” They chanted “Protect our kids” and “Our kids, our choice.”Almost everyone in the crowd of more than three dozen was a parent. And as they protested on a recent Friday in the Bay Area suburb of Orinda, Calif., they had the same refrain: They were there for their children.Most had never been to a political rally before. But after seeing their children isolated and despondent early in the coronavirus pandemic, they despaired, they said. On Facebook, they found other worried parents who sympathized with them. They shared notes and online articles — many of them misleading — about the reopening of schools and the efficacy of vaccines and masks. Soon, those issues crowded out other concerns.“I wish I’d woken up to this cause sooner,” said one protester, Lisa Longnecker, 54, who has a 17-year-old son. “But I can’t think of a single more important issue. It’s going to decide how I vote.”Ms. Longnecker and her fellow objectors are part of a potentially destabilizing new movement: parents who joined the anti-vaccine and anti-mask cause during the pandemic, narrowing their political beliefs to a single-minded obsession over those issues. Their thinking hardened even as Covid-19 restrictions and mandates were eased and lifted, cementing in some cases into a skepticism of all vaccines.Nearly half of Americans oppose masking and a similar share is against vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, polls show. But what is obscured in those numbers is the intensity with which some parents have embraced these views. While they once described themselves as Republicans or Democrats, they now identify as independents who plan to vote based solely on vaccine policies.Their transformation injects an unpredictable element into November’s midterm elections. Fueled by a sense of righteousness after Covid vaccine and mask mandates ended, many of these parents have become increasingly dogmatic, convinced that unless they act, new mandates will be passed after the midterms.To back up their beliefs, some have organized rallies and disrupted local school board meetings. Others are raising money for anti-mask and anti-vaccine candidates like J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio; Reinette Senum, an independent running for governor in California; and Rob Astorino, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in New York.In interviews, 27 parents who called themselves anti-vaccine and anti-mask voters described strikingly similar paths to their new views. They said they had experienced alarm about their children during pandemic quarantines. They pushed to reopen schools and craved normalcy. They became angry, blaming lawmakers for the disruption to their children’s lives.Many congregated in Facebook groups that initially focused on advocating in-person schooling. Those groups soon latched onto other issues, such as anti-mask and anti-vaccine messaging. While some parents left the online groups when schools reopened, others took more extreme positions over time, burrowing into private anti-vaccine channels on messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.Eventually, some began questioning vaccines for measles and other diseases, where inoculations have long been proven effective. Activists who oppose all vaccines further enticed them by joining online parent groups and posting inaccurate medical studies and falsehoods.“So many people, but especially young parents, have come to this cause in the last year,” said Janine Pera, 65, a longtime activist against all vaccines who attended the Orinda protest. “It’s been a huge gift to the movement.”The extent of activity is evident on Facebook. Since 2020, more than 200 Facebook groups aimed at reopening schools or opposing closings have been created in states including Texas, Florida and Ohio, with more than 300,000 members, according to a review by The New York Times. Another 100 anti-mask Facebook groups dedicated to ending masking in schools have also sprung up in states including New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, some with tens of thousands of members.Since the outbreak of Covid-19, many Facebook groups have sprung up opposing mask mandates.Renée DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory who has studied anti-vaccine activism, said the movement had indoctrinated parents into feeling “like they are part of their community, and that community supports specific candidates or policies.”Their emergence has confounded Republican and Democratic strategists, who worried they were losing voters to candidates willing to take absolute positions on vaccines and masks.“A lot of Democrats might think these voters are now unreachable, even if they voted for the party recently,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a Democratic political adviser to former President Barack Obama.Read More on Facebook and MetaA New Name: In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would change its name to Meta, as part of a wider strategy shift toward the so-called metaverse that aims at introducing people to shared virtual worlds.Morphing Into Meta: Mr. Zuckerberg is setting a relentless pace as he leads the company into the next phase. But the pivot  is causing internal disruption and uncertainty.Zuckerberg’s No. 2: In June, Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief financing officer announced she would step down from Meta, depriving Mr. Zuckerberg of his top deputy.Tough Times Ahead: After years of financial strength, the company is now grappling with upheaval in the global economy, a blow to its advertising business and a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit.Nathan Leamer, who worked at the Federal Communications Commission during the Trump administration and is now vice president of public affairs at the firm Targeted Victory, said Republican candidates — some of whom have publicly been against Covid vaccine mandates — were better positioned to attract these voters. He pointed to last year’s surprise win in Virginia of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, after he gained the support of young parents by invoking their frustration over Covid-driven school closures.Even so, Mr. Leamer said, these parents were a wild card in November. “The truth is that we don’t really know what these voters will do,” he said.‘I Found My People’Natalya Murakhver, 50, once considered herself a Democrat who prioritized environmental and food sustainability issues. Sam James, 41, said he was a Democrat who worried about climate change. Sarah Levy, 37, was an independent who believed in social justice causes.That was before the pandemic. In 2020, when the coronavirus swept in and led to lockdowns, Ms. Murakhver’s two daughters — Violet, 5, and Clementine, 9 — climbed the walls of the family’s Manhattan apartment, complaining of boredom and crying that they missed their friends.In Chicago, Mr. James’s two toddlers developed social anxiety after their preschool shuttered, he said. Ms. Levy said her autistic 7-year-old son watched TV for hours and stopped speaking in full sentences.“We were seeing real trauma happening because programs for children were shut down,” said Ms. Levy, a stay-at-home mother in Miami.But when they posted about the fears for their children on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, they were told to stop complaining, they said. Other parents called them “selfish” and “whiny.” Alienated, they sought other like-minded parents online.Many found a community on Facebook. New groups, mostly started by parents, were rapidly appearing on the social network, with people pushing for schools to reopen. In California, 62 Facebook groups dedicated to reopening or keeping elementary schools open popped up late last year, according to a review by The Times. There were 21 such groups in Ohio and 37 in New York. Most ranged in size from under 100 members to more than 150,000.Facebook, which is owned by Meta, declined to comment.The company has removed groups that spread misinformation about Covid-19 and vaccines.“We couldn’t stand by and watch our children suffer without their friends and teachers,” said Natalya Murakhver, a mother of two.Marko Dukic for The New York TimesMs. Murakhver joined some Facebook groups and became particularly active in one called “Keep NYC Schools Open,” which petitioned the city to open schools and keep them open through Covid surges. Last year, she became a group administrator, helping to admit new members and moderating discussions. The group swelled to 2,500 members.“We had the same cause to rally behind,” Ms. Murakhver said. “We couldn’t stand by and watch our children suffer without their friends and teachers.”In Chicago, Mr. James joined two Facebook groups pushing Chicago schools to reopen. In Miami, Ms. Levy jumped into national Facebook groups and discussed how to force the federal government to mandate that schools everywhere reopen.“I found my people,” Ms. Levy said. While she had been an independent, she said she found common ground with Republicans “who understood that for us, worse than the virus, was having our kid trapped at home and out of school.”Into the Online Rabbit HoleThe Facebook groups were just the beginning of an online journey that took some parents from more mainstream views of reopening schools toward a single-issue position.In Chico, Calif., Kim Snyder, 36, who has a 7-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son, said she was a longtime Republican. After her children had to stay home in the pandemic, she helped create a Facebook group in 2020 for Chico parents committed to reopening schools full-time.At the time, her local schools had partially reopened and children were learning both online and in-person, Ms. Snyder said. But frustration over hybrid learning was mounting, and schools were repeatedly shut down when Covid surged.By mid-2021, Ms. Snyder’s Facebook group had splintered. Some parents were satisfied with the safety measures and hybrid learning and stopped participating in online discussions, she said. Others were angry that they had not returned to a prepandemic way of living.Protesters demanded the removal of the indoor mask mandate for the Los Angeles Unified School District in March.Caroline Brehman/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Snyder counted herself in the latter category. She channeled her discontent by attending in-person protests against mask requirements at public schools. At the rallies, she met activists who opposed all types of vaccines. She invited some to join her Facebook group, she said, “because we were all fighting for the same thing. We wanted a return to normalcy.”The focus of her Facebook group soon morphed from reopening schools to standing against masks in schools. By late last year, more content decrying every vaccine had also started appearing in the Facebook group.“I started to read more about how masks and vaccines were causing all this damage to our kids,” Ms. Snyder said.Scientific advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccine shots are considered safe for young children. But Ms. Snyder said she became convinced they were wrong. She browsed other Facebook groups too, to meet more parents with similar beliefs.Activists posted statistics about Covid vaccines in those Facebook groups. Often that information came from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a database maintained by the C.D.C. and the Food and Drug Administration, which allows anyone to submit data. The C.D.C. has warned that the database “cannot prove that a vaccine caused a problem.”Yet in a September 2021 post in Ms. Snyder’s Facebook group, parents pointed to VAERS figures that they said showed thousands of vaccine-induced deaths.“This is absolutely dangerous!” one parent wrote. “This hasn’t been really tested and is NOT NECESSARY….OMG!”Another post titled “If you want to really know what is going on, read this” linked to an article that falsely claimed vaccines could leave children sterile. The article was originally posted to a Facebook group named Children’s Health Defense, which supports an organization founded and chaired by the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.That tipped some parents into repudiating every vaccine, from chickenpox to hepatitis, and against vaccine mandates of any kind. A right to self-determination so that parents could decide what vaccines their children took was paramount.“For the first time, I began to look at the statistics and questioned whether all the vaccines I had previously given my kids made sense,” Ms. Snyder said.Soon she joined explicitly anti-vaccine Facebook groups that activists linked to, including ones supporting Children’s Health Defense. In those forums, parents seethed at the authorities, arguing they had no right to tell them what to do with their children’s bodies. Activists posted other links to Twitter and Telegram and urged parents to join them there, warning that Facebook often removed their content for misinformation.One link led to a Telegram channel run by Denise Aguilar, an anti-vaccine activist in Stockton, Calif. Ms. Aguilar, who speaks about her experiences as a mother on social media and on conservative podcasts, also runs a survivalist organization called Mamalitia, a self-described mom militia. She has more than 100,000 followers across her TikTok and Telegram channels.Early in the pandemic, Ms. Aguilar posted conspiracy theories about the coronavirus’s origins and questioned the effectiveness of masking. Now her messaging has changed to focus on political activism for the midterms. Denise Aguilar, right, an anti-vaccine activist, joined other activists in blocking the door to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office in Sacramento in September 2019.Rich Pedroncelli/Associated PressIn June, Ms. Aguilar encouraged her Telegram followers to vote for Carlos Villapudua, a Democrat running for California State Assembly who voted against a bill that would let children aged 12 and older get vaccinated without parental consent.“Patriots unite!” wrote Ms. Aguilar, who didn’t respond to a request for comment. “We need to support freedom loving Americans.”From Talk to ActionBy late last year, the talk among parent groups on Facebook, Telegram and Instagram had shifted from vaccine dangers to taking action in the midterms.Ms. Snyder said her involvement against vaccines would “100 percent determine” whom she voted for in November. She said she was disappointed in Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat who encouraged masking and promoted the coronavirus vaccines.In New York, Ms. Murakhaver, who previously supported candidates who favored strong environmental protection laws, said she would vote based solely on a candidate’s position on mandates on all children’s vaccines.The Facebook group she helped operate, Keep NYC Schools Open, has shut down. But Ms. Murakhaver remains close with activists she met through the group, chatting with them on Signal and WhatsApp. While her children were vaccinated against measles and other diseases when they were babies, she now opposes any mandate that would force other parents to inoculate their children.“I’m a single-issue voter now, and I can’t see myself supporting Democratic Party candidates unless they show they fought to keep our kids in school and let parents make decisions about masks and vaccines,” she said, adding that she prefers Mr. Astorino for New York governor over the Democratic incumbent, Kathy Hochul.While states including California have deferred bills requiring Covid-19 vaccines for students attending public schools, many parents said they worried the mandates would be passed after the midterms.“If we don’t show up and vote, these bills could come back in the future,” Ms. Snyder said.A “Defeat the Mandate” rally in April to protest vaccine mandates.Damian Dovarganes/Associated PressAt the Orinda demonstration in April, more than 50 people gathered outside the office of Steve Glazer, a Democratic state senator to oppose coronavirus vaccine mandates.One was Jessica Barsotti, 56, who has two teenagers and was at her first rally. Previously a Democrat, Ms. Barsotti said elected officials had let her family down during the pandemic and planned to cast her ballot in November for candidates who were against vaccine mandates.“If that is Republicans so be it. If it is independents, fine,” she said. “I’m not looking at their party affiliation but how they fall on this one issue. It’s changed me as a person and as a voter.”

Researchers and regulators say Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician, creates and profits from misleading claims about Covid-19. “I have every right to inform the public,” he says.SAN FRANCISCO — The article that appeared online on Feb. 9 began with a seemingly innocuous question about the legal definition of vaccines. Then over its next 3,400 words, it declared coronavirus vaccines were “a medical fraud” and said the injections did not prevent infections, provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease.Instead, the article claimed, the shots “alter your genetic coding, turning you into a viral protein factory that has no off-switch.”Its assertions were easily disprovable. No matter. Over the next few hours, the article was translated from English into Spanish and Polish. It appeared on dozens of blogs and was picked up by anti-vaccination activists, who repeated the false claims online. The article also made its way to Facebook, where it reached 400,000 people, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool.The entire effort traced back to one person: Joseph Mercola.Dr. Mercola, 67, an osteopathic physician in Cape Coral, Fla., has long been a subject of criticism and government regulatory actions for his promotion of unproven or unapproved treatments. But most recently, he has become the chief spreader of coronavirus misinformation online, according to researchers.An internet-savvy entrepreneur who employs dozens, Dr. Mercola has published over 600 articles on Facebook that cast doubt on Covid-19 vaccines since the pandemic began, reaching a far larger audience than other vaccine skeptics, an analysis by The New York Times found. His claims have been widely echoed on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.The activity has earned Dr. Mercola, a natural health proponent with an Everyman demeanor, the dubious distinction of the top spot in the “Disinformation Dozen,” a list of 12 people responsible for sharing 65 percent of all anti-vaccine messaging on social media, said the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate. Others on the list include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, and Erin Elizabeth, the founder of the website Health Nut News, who is also Dr. Mercola’s girlfriend.“Mercola is the pioneer of the anti-vaccine movement,” said Kolina Koltai, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online conspiracy theories. “He’s a master of capitalizing on periods of uncertainty, like the pandemic, to grow his movement.”Some high-profile media figures have promoted skepticism of the vaccines, notably Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham of Fox News, though other Fox personalities have urged viewers to get the shots. Now, Dr. Mercola and others in the “Disinformation Dozen” are in the spotlight as vaccinations in the United States slow, just as the highly infectious Delta variant has fueled a resurgence in coronavirus cases. More than 97 percent of people hospitalized for Covid-19 are unvaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.President Biden has blamed online falsehoods for causing people to refrain from getting the injections. But even as Mr. Biden has urged social media companies to “do something about the misinformation,” Dr. Mercola shows the difficulty of that task.Over the last decade, Dr. Mercola has built a vast operation to push natural health cures, disseminate anti-vaccination content and profit from all of it, said researchers who have studied his network. In 2017, he filed an affidavit claiming his net worth was “in excess of $100 million.”And rather than directly stating online that vaccines don’t work, Dr. Mercola’s posts often ask pointed questions about their safety and discuss studies that other doctors have refuted. Facebook and Twitter have allowed some of his posts to remain up with caution labels, and the companies have struggled to create rules to pull down posts that have nuance.“He has been given new life by social media, which he exploits skillfully and ruthlessly to bring people into his thrall,” said Imran Ahmed, director of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which studies misinformation and hate speech. Its “Disinformation Dozen” report has been cited in congressional hearings and by the White House.In an email, Dr. Mercola said it was “quite peculiar to me that I am named as the #1 superspreader of misinformation.” Some of his Facebook posts were only liked by hundreds of people, he said, so he didn’t understand “how the relatively small number of shares could possibly cause such calamity to Biden’s multibillion dollar vaccination campaign.”The efforts against him are political, Dr. Mercola added, and he accused the White House of “illegal censorship by colluding with social media companies.”He did not address whether his coronavirus claims were factual. “I am the lead author of a peer reviewed publication regarding vitamin D and the risk of Covid-19 and I have every right to inform the public by sharing my medical research,” he said. He did not identify the publication, and The Times was unable to verify his claim.A native of Chicago, Dr. Mercola started a small private practice in 1985 in Schaumburg, Ill. In the 1990s, he began shifting to natural health medicine and opened his main website, Mercola.com, to share his treatments, cures and advice. The site urges people to “take control of your health.”In 2003, he published a book, “The No-Grain Diet,” which became a New York Times best seller. He has since published books almost yearly. In 2015, he moved to Florida.As his popularity grew, Dr. Mercola began a cycle. It starts with making unproven and sometimes far-fetched health claims, such as that spring mattresses amplify harmful radiation, and then selling products online — from vitamin supplements to organic yogurt — that he promotes as alternative treatments.To buttress the operation, he set up companies like Mercola.com Health Resources and Mercola Consulting Services. These entities have offices in Florida and the Philippines with teams of employees. Using this infrastructure, Dr. Mercola has seized on news moments to rapidly publish blog posts, newsletters and videos in nearly a dozen languages to a network of websites and social media.The Mercola headquarters in Cape Coral, Fla.MercolaHis audience is substantial. Dr. Mercola’s official English-language Facebook page has over 1.7 million followers, while his Spanish-language page has 1 million followers. The Times also found 17 other Facebook pages that appeared to be run by him or were closely connected to his businesses. On Twitter, he has nearly 300,000 followers, plus nearly 400,000 on YouTube.Dr. Mercola has a keen understanding of what makes something go viral online, said two former employees, who declined to be identified because they had signed nondisclosure agreements. He routinely does A/B testing, they said, in which many versions of the same content are published to see what spreads fastest online..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In his email, Dr. Mercola said, “Translation and a variety of media positions are standard for most content oriented websites.”Facebook said it has labeled many of Dr. Mercola’s posts as false, banned advertising on his main page and removed some of his pages after they violated its policies. Twitter said it has also taken down some of Dr. Mercola’s posts and labeled others. YouTube said Dr. Mercola was not part of a program from which he can make money from ads on his videos.In 2012, Dr. Mercola began writing about the virtues of tanning beds. He argued that they reduced the chances of getting cancer, while also selling tanning beds with names like Vitality and D-lite for $1,200 to $4,000 each. Many of the articles were based on discredited studies.The Federal Trade Commission brought false-advertising claims against Dr. Mercola in 2017 based on the health claims about tanning beds. He settled and sent $2.95 million in refunds to customers who bought the tanning beds.The Food and Drug Administration has also issued warning letters to Dr. Mercola for selling unapproved health products in 2005, 2006 and 2011 and has fined him millions of dollars.Many of Dr. Mercola’s claims have been amplified by other vaccine skeptics, including Ms. Elizabeth. She worked for Mercola.com from 2009 to 2011, according to her LinkedIn page.But while Ms. Elizabeth and others are overtly anti-vaccine, Dr. Mercola has appeared more approachable because he takes less radical positions than his peers, Ms. Koltai said. “He takes away from the idea that an anti-vaccination activist is a fringe person,” she said.In an email, Ms. Elizabeth said she was “shocked to have been targeted as one of the 12” in the “Disinformation Dozen” and called it a “witch hunt.” When the coronavirus hit last year, Dr. Mercola jumped on the news, with posts questioning the origins of the disease. In December, he used a study that examined mask-wearing by doctors to argue that masks did not stop the spread of the virus. He also began promoting vitamin supplements as a way to ward off the coronavirus. In a warning letter on Feb. 18, the F.D.A. said Dr. Mercola had “misleadingly represented” what were “unapproved and misbranded products” on Mercola.com as established Covid-19 treatments.In May, Dr. Mercola took down many of his own Facebook posts to evade the social network’s crackdown on anti-vaccine content. Facebook also recently removed his Feb. 9 article.But Dr. Mercola has continued to raise vaccine questions. In a Facebook post on Friday, he used another study to mull how useful the Pfizer vaccine was against Covid-19 variants. One headline in the post said the vaccine was only 39 percent effective, but it did not cite another statistic from the study that said the vaccine was 91 percent effective against serious illness.“Is this possible? We were told 95 percent effectiveness,” he wrote.Within a few hours, the post had been shared more than 220 times.Davey Alba

The company doesn’t know some specifics about how falsehoods about Covid-19 and vaccines for the virus spread on its social network.SAN FRANCISCO — At the start of the pandemic, a group of data scientists at Facebook held a meeting with executives to ask for resources to help measure the prevalence of misinformation about Covid-19 on the social network.The data scientists said figuring out how many Facebook users saw false or misleading information would be complex, perhaps taking a year a more, according to two people who participated in the meeting. But they added that by putting some new hires on the project and reassigning some existing employees to it, the company could better understand how incorrect facts about the virus spread on the platform.The executives never approved the resources, and the team was never told why, according to the people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.Now, more than a year later, Facebook has been caught in a firestorm about the very type of information that the data scientists were hoping to track.The White House and other federal agencies have pressed the company to hand over data about how anti-vaccine narratives spread online, and have accused Facebook of withholding key information. President Biden on Friday accused the company of “killing people” by allowing false information to circulate widely. On Monday, he walked that back slightly, instead directing blame at people who originate falsehoods.“Anyone listening to it is getting hurt by it,” Mr. Biden said. He said he hoped that instead of “taking it personally,” Facebook would “do something about the misinformation.”The company has responded with statistics on how many posts containing misinformation it has removed, as well as how many Americans it has directed to factual information about the government’s pandemic response. In a blog post on Saturday, Facebook asked the Biden administration to stop “finger-pointing,” and casting blame on Facebook after missing its goal of vaccinating 70 percent of American adults by July 4.“Facebook is not the reason this goal was missed,” Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, said in the post.But the pointed back-and-forth struck an uncomfortable chord for the company: It doesn’t actually know many specifics about how misinformation about the coronavirus and the vaccines to combat it have spread. That blind spot has reinforced concerns among misinformation researchers over Facebook’s selective release of data, and how aggressively — or not — the company has studied misinformation on its platform.“The suggestion we haven’t put resources toward combating Covid misinformation and supporting the vaccine rollout is just not supported by the facts,” said Dani Lever, a Facebook spokeswoman. “With no standard definition for vaccine misinformation, and with both false and even true content (often shared by mainstream media outlets) potentially discouraging vaccine acceptance, we focus on the outcomes — measuring whether people who use Facebook are accepting of Covid-19 vaccines.”Executives at Facebook, including its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have said the company committed to removing Covid-19 misinformation since the start of the pandemic. The company said it had removed over 18 million pieces of Covid-19 misinformation since the start of the pandemic.Experts who study disinformation said the number of pieces that Facebook removed was not as informative as how many were uploaded to the site, or in which groups and pages people were seeing the spread of misinformation.“They need to open up the black box that is their content ranking and content amplification architecture. Take that black box and open it up for audit by independent researchers and government,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that aims to combat disinformation. “We don’t know how many Americans have been infected with misinformation.”Mr. Ahmed’s group, using publicly available data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned program, found that 12 people were responsible for 65 percent of the Covid-19 misinformation on Facebook. The White House, including Mr. Biden, has repeated that figure in the past week. Facebook says it disagrees with the characterization of the “disinformation dozen,” adding that some of their pages and accounts were removed, while others no longer post content that violate Facebook’s rules.Renée DiResta, a disinformation researcher at Stanford’s Internet Observatory, called on Facebook to release more granular data, which would allow experts to understand how false claims about the vaccine were affecting specific communities within the country. The information, which is known as “prevalence data,” essentially looks at how widespread a narrative is, such as what percentage of people in a community on the service see it.“The reason more granular prevalence data is needed is that false claims don’t spread among all audiences equally,” Ms. DiResta said. “In order to effectively counter specific false claims that communities are seeing, civil society organization and researchers need a better sense of what is happening within those groups.”Many employees within Facebook have made the same argument. Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president in charge of partnerships strategy, told CNN on Sunday that he had argued while at the company that it should publicly share as much information as possible. When asked about the dispute with the White House over Covid misinformation, he said, “Facebook has that data.”“They look at it,” Mr. Boland. But he added: “Do they look at it the right way? Are they investing in the teams as fully as they should?”`Mr. Boland’s comments were widely repeated as evidence that Facebook has the requested data but is not sharing it. He did not respond to a request for comment from The New York Times, but one of the data scientists who pushed inside Facebook for deeper study of coronavirus misinformation said the problem was more about whether and how the company studied the data.Technically, the person said, the company has data on all content that moves through its platforms. But measuring and tracking Covid misinformation first requires defining and labeling what qualifies as misinformation, something the person said the company had not dedicated resources toward.Some at Facebook have suggested the government, or health officials, should be the ones who define misinformation. Only once that key baseline is set can data scientists begin to build out systems known as qualifiers, which measure the spread of certain information.Given the billions of individual pieces of content posted to Facebook daily, the undertaking of measuring, tracking and ultimately calculating the prevalence of misinformation would be a huge task, the person said.The meeting held at the start of the pandemic was not the only time Facebook had internal discussions about how to track misinformation.Members of Facebook’s communications team raised the question of prevalence as well, telling executives last summer and fall that it would be useful for disputing articles by journalists who used CrowdTangle to write articles about the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation, according to a Facebook employee involved in those discussions.After the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Zuckerberg sought a similar statistic on how much “fake news” Americans had seen leading up to it, a member of Facebook’s communications team said. One week after the vote, Mr. Zuckerberg published a blog post saying the false news had amounted to “less than 1 percent,” but the company did not clarify that estimate or give more details despite being pressed by reporters.Months later, Adam Mosseri, a Facebook executive who was then the head of NewsFeed, said part of the problem was that “fake news means different things to different people.”Davey Alba

Hundreds of sellers are offering false and stolen vaccine cards, as businesses and states weigh proof of vaccinations for getting people back to work and play.SAN FRANCISCO — On Etsy, eBay, Facebook and Twitter, little rectangular slips of paper started showing up for sale in late January. Printed on card stock, they measured three-by-four inches and featured crisp black lettering. Sellers listed them for $20 to $60 each, with a discount on bundles of three or more. Laminated ones cost extra.All were forgeries or falsified copies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccination cards, which are given to people who have been inoculated against Covid-19 in the United States.“We found hundreds of online stores selling the cards, potentially thousands were sold,” said Saoud Khalifah, the founder of FakeSpot, which offers tools to detect fake listings and reviews online.The coronavirus has made opportunists out of many people, like those who hoarded bottles of hand sanitizer at the start of the pandemic or those who cheated recipients out of their stimulus checks. Now online scammers have latched onto the latest profit-making initiative: the little white cards that provide proof of shots.Online stores offering counterfeit or stolen vaccine cards have mushroomed in recent weeks, Mr. Khalifah said. The efforts are far from hidden, with Facebook pages named “vax-cards” and eBay listings with “blank vaccine cards” openly hawking the items.A screenshot of a “vax cards” page on  Facebook. Selling fake vaccination cards could break federal laws that forbid copying the C.D.C. logo, legal experts said. If the cards were stolen and filled out with false numbers and dates, they could also violate identity theft laws, they said.But profiteers have pressed ahead as demand for the cards has grown from anti-vaccine activists and other groups. Airlines and other companies have recently said they may require proof of Covid-19 immunization so that people can safely travel or attend events.The cards may also become central to “vaccine passports,” which offer digital proof of vaccinations. Some tech companies developing vaccine passports ask people to upload copies of their C.D.C. cards. Los Angeles also recently began using the C.D.C. cards for its own digital proof of immunization.Last week, 45 state attorneys general banded together to call on Twitter, Shopify and eBay to stop the sale of false and stolen vaccine cards. The officials said they were monitoring the activity and were concerned that unvaccinated people would misuse the cards to attend large events, potentially spreading the virus and prolonging the pandemic.“We’re seeing a huge market for these false cards online,” said Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, whose office has investigated fraud related to the virus. “This is a dangerous practice that undermines public health.”The C.D.C. said it was “aware of cases of fraud regarding counterfeit Covid-19 vaccine cards.” It asked people not to share images of their personal information or vaccine cards on social media.Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Shopify and Etsy said that the sale of fake vaccine cards violated their rules and that they were removing posts that advertised the items.The C.D.C. introduced the vaccination cards in December, describing them as the “simplest” way to keep track of Covid-19 shots. By January, sales of false vaccine cards started picking up, Mr. Khalifah said. Many people found the cards were easy to forge from samples available online. Authentic cards were also stolen by pharmacists from their workplaces and put up for sale, he said.Many people who bought the cards were opposed to the Covid-19 vaccines, Mr. Khalifah said. In some anti-vaccine groups on Facebook, people have publicly boasted about getting the cards.“My body my choice,” wrote one commenter in a Facebook post last month. Another person replied, “can’t wait to get mine too, lol.”Other buyers want to use the cards to trick pharmacists into giving them a vaccine, Mr. Khalifah said. Because some of the vaccines are two-shot regimens, people can enter a false date for a first inoculation on the card, which makes it appear as if they need a second dose soon. Some pharmacies and state vaccination sites have prioritized people due for their second shots.The tweet linked to a now-defunct Etsy shop that sold fake vaccine cards. One Etsy seller, who declined to be identified, said she had sold dozens of fake vaccine cards for $20 each recently. She justified her actions by saying she was helping people evade a “tyrannical government.” She added that she did not plan to get inoculated.Vaccine proponents say they have been troubled by the proliferation of forged and stolen cards. To hold those people accountable, Savannah Sparks, a pharmacist in Biloxi, Miss., began posting videos on TikTok last month naming the sellers of falsified vaccine cards.In one video, Ms. Sparks explained how she had tracked down the name of a pharmacy technician in Illinois who had nabbed several cards for herself and her husband and then posted about it online. The pharmacy technician had not disclosed her identity, but had linked the post to her social media accounts, where she used her real name. The video has 1.2 million views.“It made me so mad that a pharmacist was using her access and position this way,” Ms. Sparks said. The video drew the attention of the Illinois Pharmacists Association, which said it reported the video to a state board for further investigation.Ms. Sparks said her work had drawn detractors and vaccine opponents, who have threatened her and posted her home phone number and address online. But she was undeterred.“They should be first in line advocating for people to get vaccinated,” she said of pharmacists. “Instead, they’re trying to use their positions to spread fear and help people circumvent getting the vaccine.”Mr. Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general, said in addition to violating federal copyright laws, the sale of counterfeit and stolen cards most likely broke civil and consumer protection laws that mandate that an item can be used as advertised. The cards could also violate state laws regarding impersonation, he said.“We want to see them stop immediately,” Mr. Shapiro said of the fraudsters. “And we want to see the companies take serious and immediate action.”