A YouTube spokeswoman said the videos contradicted vaccine information from the World Health Organization (WHO) or health authorities such as the NHS. In October, it banned vaccine misinformation in a bid to clamp down on attempts to discredit the jabs. It added that in the past year, it had removed more than 800,000 videos for coronavirus misinformation. That figure covers more than just vaccines, but wider “medically unsubstantiated” claims about the virus. The misinformation included information such as the vaccine kills people causes infertility, or contains a secret microchip that will be implanted into recipients. These are claims that a number of Kenyans actually believe and are claims that are quickly spreading on social media. YouTube has had its challenges. In the early stages of the pandemic, YouTube was home to many conspiracy theories about the disease and even false claims of non-existent “cures”. Despite its ban on such content, finding and deleting it remains a struggle for YouTube and other social platforms. A universal criticism of social media sites throughout the pandemic has been the slow speed at which they have acted over harmful disinformation. In recent months, attention has turned to how much they have allowed falsehoods about the vaccine to proliferate on their platforms. How impactful is this information? The fact is social media is quite powerful so in this case its evident that a number of people will not be taking the jab because of these conspiracies (which even I feel some are true because of social media) but it is important to consume content that are hard facts and not just rumours.
