Amazon's search algorithm boosts books promoting false claims about vaccines over those that debunk health misinformation, the researchers found — and as customers engage with products espousing bogus science, Amazon's recommendation algorithms point them to additional health misinformation.
Amazon is a "marketplace of multifaceted health misinformation," wrote co-authors
The top eight search results Thursday afternoon for the phrase "vaccine" in Amazon's online bookstore, for instance, were vaccine denialist tomes — including books like "Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines Are Safe and Effective is Lying," by the British conspiracy theorist
"This book confirmed everything I have suspected about vaccines," one verified purchaser commented earlier this week below Coleman's book, which is sold by Amazon.com. "Read this book!"
In the context of the ongoing mass COVID-19 vaccination campaign, "battling against anti-vax misinformation has never been more important," Juneja said in an interview Thursday. "This is the most urgent time."
Amazon provides "customers with access to a variety of viewpoints. We're committed to providing a positive customer experience and have policies that outline what products may be sold in our stores," a company spokesperson said in a statement. "Our shopping and discovery tools are not designed to generate results oriented to a specific point of view and we are always listening to customer feedback." Amazon recently added a banner linking to the federal government's fact page on COVID-19 vaccines above results for searches with the keyword "vaccine."
Other academics have examined how the result-ranking algorithms of search providers like Google and social networks like Facebook and Twitter contribute to the spread of misinformation, but the
Overall, more than 10% of Amazon products returned for search terms like "vaccine," "immunization" and "autism" are misinformative, according to the
Amazon has previously faced scrutiny over the sale on its platform of pseudoscientific dietary supplements and media promoting vaccine conspiracy theories. After a 2019
During last summer's bump in coronavirus cases,
But unlike the market for dietary supplements, which is dominated by third-party vendors using Amazon's Marketplace platform, Amazon itself is selling many of the top-ranked vaccine denialist books, a review of the first five pages of search results for "vaccine" shows. Plenty of those are available for free to
Platforms like Amazon have a responsibility to adjust their algorithms to not favor misinformation, Juneja said, because "people trust the results that search engines show to them."
Previous research from the
Some platforms have taken action to reduce the spread of health misinformation through their sites.
Facebook and Twitter announced last month that they would begin removing vaccine misinformation, a measure taken as public health officials began ramping up mass vaccination campaigns to control the spread of COVID-19. Both have previously taken steps to delete posts with false coronavirus information. (Here's how to spot fake vaccine information in your social networks.)
Previously, Google and YouTube have said they would deprioritize health misinformation in their search algorithms and pull ads from anti-vaccination conspiracy theories.
Amazon recently curbed sales of products promoting neo-Nazi views and the QAnon conspiracy theories after the
(c)2021 The Seattle Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.