Conspiracy theorists have latched on to the debate over U.S. abortion rights on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok, leading to a spike in misinformation around what is already one of the most politically-charged topics online—and signaling the complex decision-making that lies ahead for social media companies if the procedure becomes illegal in some states.
Nearly 200 far right Facebook groups with names like “Nashville Tea Party” and “Southern Conservatives United” lit up with posts spreading the baseless idea that the Antifa movement—a loose collective of antifascist activists—had helped coordinate the leak as part of a broad leftist campaign of intimidation and violence against the Supreme Court justices. On Twitter, hundreds of tweets questioned the timing of the draft ruling’s leak, asserting that it distracted from news favorable to Donald Trump. And on Telegram, dozens of chats dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy, which falsely posits that a group of global liberal elites run a child sex ring that Trump would stop, discussed how abortion is a form of human sacrifice.
These false storylines surged to the thousands or tens of thousands mentions in the last week, according to Zignal Labs, which tracks topics on social media and in the news. According to Zignal, content from less reliable sources referencing abortion has more than doubled since Politico’s publication of the leaked draft, compared to the volume of conversation on abortion the month before the leak occurred, which was already heightened due to changing laws in some states.
Misinformation about abortion has long circulated in right-wing communities. For issues like the pandemic, which has prompted a surge in anti-vaccination conspiracies, and the 2020 election results, which led to false theories that it was stolen from Trump, social media companies have broadly labeled posts redirecting users to information from authorities. But for abortion, a politically-charged medical issue, they are unlikely to come up with a specific labeling campaign, and instead let the posts be moderated under a broader rule, that content can be taken down if it will lead to “imminent harm.”
https://fortune.com/2022/05/13/abortion-misinformation-surges-social-media-roe-v-wade/