Replication Data for: Labelling, shadow bans and community resistance: did meta’s strategy to suppress rather than remove COVID misinformation and conspiracy theory on facebook slow the spread?

Abstract: In March 2020, shortly after the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, Facebook (the company is now rebranded as Meta) announced steps to stop the spread of COVID-19 and vaccine-related misinformation. This entailed identifying and removing false and misleading content that could contribute to “imminent physical harm”. For other types of misinformation the company’s fact-checking network was mobilised and automated moderation systems ramped up to “reduce its distribution”. In this paper we ask how effective this approach has been in stopping the spread of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation in the Australian social media landscape? To address this question we analyse the performance of 18 Australian right-wing and anti-vaccination Facebook pages, posts and commenting sections collected over 2 years until July 2021. We use CrowdTangle’s engagement metrics and time series analysis to map key policy announcements (between Jan 2020 and July 2021) against page performance. This is combined with content analysis of comments parsed from 2 pages, and a selection of posts that continued to overperform during this timeframe. The results showed that the suppression strategy was partially effective, in that the performance of many previously high performing pages showed steady decline between 2019 and 2021. Nonetheless, some pages not only slipped through the net but overperformed, proving this strategy to be light-touch, selective and inconsistent. The content analysis shows that labelling and fact-checking of content and shadowbanning responses were resisted by the user community who employed a range of avoidance tactics to stay engaged on the platform, while also migrating some conversations to less moderated platforms.