UNESCO awards Gabon's Ivindo park World Heritage status


Issued on: 28/07/2021

The 300,000-hectare (740,000-acre) Ivindo park is is home to many engangered animals such as gorillas 

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Gabon's Ivindo National Park was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site on Wednesday in recognition of the nation's success in defending biodiversity and challenging climate change.

The park is the second nature reserve -- after Lope Park in 2007 -- to be listed in this small central African country, which is 90 percent covered by forest and known for efforts to preserve its natural heritage.

"A great day," tweeted President Ali Bongo Ondimba, adding that the inclusion "rewards Gabon's efforts to protect its forests, which play a key role in the fight against global warming".

At the end of June, Gabon became the first African country to be paid by international funds to continue its efforts against deforestation on its territory.

The 300,000-hectare (740,000-acre) park is home to some emblematic mammals, now threatened, such as the forest elephant, gorilla, chimpanzee, leopard and three species of pangolin.

Some parts of the site are barely explored, according to UNESCO.

For several years, the Gabonese authorities have developed a relatively advanced policy to protect the Central African rainforest, called "the second lung of the earth" after the Amazon.

It has 13 national parks, covering 11 percent of its territory, and 20 marine protected areas. Gabon is home to nearly 60 percent of Africa's remaining forest elephants, recently listed as critically endangered.

© 2021 AFP

Could display drones snuff out the firework?


FROME, England (Reuters) - Concerns about pollution and the environment could see drone displays - such as the one featured in the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony - replace fireworks as the light show of choice in the night sky.

© Reuters/KIM KYUNG-HOON FILE PHOTO:

 Tokyo 2020 Olympics - The Tokyo 2020 Olympics Opening Ceremony

Governments in China and India have already tried to limit the number of fireworks set off during celebrations for the Lunar New Year and Diwali to minimise dangerous air pollution.

And even Sydney in Australia, famous for its New Year firework display, is considering replacing the pyrotechnics with drones to reduce the risk of bushfires, according to reports in Australian media last year.

One company hoping to capitalise on such a shift is British-based Celestial, which puts on displays flying up to 300 drones in formation and says the technology is developing fast.

In a practice session seen by Reuters at an airfield in Somerset, England, a drone swarm morphed into shapes such as a walking toy robot, a dancer and a butterfly flapping its wings.

"Our goal ... is to supersede fireworks - We love fireworks but they blow things up, they're single-use, they make things catch on fire and they scare animals," Celestial co-founder John Hopkins told Reuters.

"What we're trying to do is create something, creatively, more interesting, green because we use renewable energy sources and we don't scare the animals."

(Reporting by Stuart McDill; Editing by Alex Richardson)

Yes, Underwater UFOs Are a Thing, And There's a Bizarre History to Them

Kyle Mizokami 

POPMECH

In October 2019, U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor, who was the subject of a New York Times article about his 2004 UFO sighting, discussed a spooky new sighting a fellow pilot revealed to him after they were both out of the Navy.

© Pexels/Pixabay 

Learn about the entire history of "unidentified submerged objects." Because it's not just UFOs out there.

According to Fravor, the eyewitness was a former pilot of the MH-53E Sea Dragon, the Navy version of the Marine Corps’ CH-53E Sea Stallion, based at Naval Station Roosevelt Roads, on the island of Puerto Rico. Twice while recovering spent practice munitions out of the water, the pilot spotted a weird underwater object.

In the first incident, the pilot saw a "dark mass" underwater as he and his team retrieved a flying practice drone. The pilot described the object as a “big” mass, “kinda circular,” and he was certain it wasn't a submarine. In the pilot’s second sighting, a practice torpedo that the pilot was sent to recover was “sucked down” into the depths of the ocean in the presence of a similar underwater object. The torpedo was never seen again.

Elsewhere in the interview, Fravor reveals that a 79-year-old woman contacted him after his sighting went public. The woman explained that her father, a naval officer, was at one time based at the naval station in San Francisco in the 1950s. When she was a child, her father showed her a telegram that stated unidentified objects had been sighted going in and out of the water at a now forgotten set of latitude and longitude coordinates. The woman’s father told her, “We get these all the time, and it’s always in the same area.”

© Dan Kitwood - Getty Images A BQM-174 high performance target drone similar to that recovered according to retired U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor.

These sightings are similar to Fravor’s own sighting. According to the retired Navy pilot, the only reason he had seen the now-infamous "Tic Tac" UFO was because it was hovering above a mysterious larger object that was sighted underwater. Fravor describes the object as cross shaped and approximately the size of a Boeing 737 jetliner. He has further described the water above it as though it were "boiling" or "frothing," and said the object disappeared after it caught his attention.

© Icon Sports Wire - Getty Images United Airlines 737-924 airliner.

In 1970, biologist Ivan Sanderson published the book Invisible Residents. Sanderson, a noted student of unusual phenomena, devoted the book to sightings of what were later called Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs. USOs are defined as unknown craft that are sighted in the water, sighted rising up out of the water, or diving into the water. Sanderson catalogued scores of reports of USOs:

On the 19th of April, 1957, crew members aboard the Kitsukawa Maru, a Japanese fishing boat, spotted two metallic silvery objects descending from the sky into the sea (original emphasis). The objects, estimated to be ten meters long, were without wings of any kind. As the hit the water, they created a violent turbulence. The exact location was reported as 31° 15’ N and 143° 30’ E.

Sanderson also reports an incident that reportedly took place off the coast of Puerto Rico in 1963 during an anti-submarine warfare exercise.
The maneuvers were conducted off Puerto Rico in the Atlantic some 500 miles southeast of the continental United States. All reports seem to agree that there were five “small” naval vessels concerned, but in more than one account the aircraft carrier Wasp is stated to have been the command ship…

A sonar operator on one of the small vessels, otherwise listed as a destroyer, reported to his bridge that one of the submarines had broken formation and gone off in what appeared to be pursuit of some unknown object. This operator did not, of course, know if this was a “plant”, since the maneuvers they were engaged in were exercises designed to train personnel in detection of enemy craft...However, this operator’s report was not all within the limits of any such simulation,. Trouble was that said subaqueous object was traveling at “over 150 knots”

!

U.S. Navy via Navsource USS Wasp in 1964.

According to Sanderson, “no less than [13] craft,” including anti-submarine warfare patrol aircraft, tracked the high-speed, unknown object. Furthermore:

It is said that technicians kept track of this object for four days, and that it maneuvered round about, and to depths of 27,000 feet.

USS Wasp was indeed an anti-submarine warfare carrier in 1963 and served in the Atlantic Fleet until decommissioning in 1972. Unfortunately, Sanderson doesn't provide any sourcing for the incident nor is there any other information about it posted on the internet.

The National UFO Recording Center maintains a database of sightings reported to the NUFORC, both by email and hotline. There are many reports of UFO-type objects seen coming out of or going into the ocean.

Off the coast of Half Moon Bay, California, an eyewitness reported that in 2007 she observed three UFOs while aboard the cruise ship Dawn Princess (renamed in 2017 Pacific Explorer.)

“After about 5 minutes, three softly glowing objects came into view – three uniform, nearly spherical objects, evenly spaced in a line parallel to the ship’s hull and hovering just above the water surface… They appeared to stay in one place while the ship moved past them. They were hovering, but didn’t disturb the water below them. Just as they went out of my sight, the left one (toward the bow) splashed down into the water and disappeared."

© James D. Morgan - Getty Images The cruise ship Dawn Princess, Western Australia, 2013.

One report logged in April 2019 states that an object resembling a “small white boat” flew up out of the water near Imperial Beach, California, “at about [500] feet.” The object promptly “flew south at a very high rate of speed.”

Whatever USOs are—figments of the imagination, mechanical malfunctions, secret government craft, or even the work of extraterrestrials—there's a long history of sightings. Fravor’s anonymous helicopter pilot is just the latest in a long line of mysteries.

International team of scientists searching for evidence of alien technology

© Provided by National Post NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 12:

Theoretical Physicist Avi Loeb speaks during the New Space Exploration Initiative

A Harvard astronomer named Avi Loeb announced the Galileo Project on Monday, in which he and an international team of scientists will search for evidence of technology built by extraterrestrial civilizations.

The Galileo Project has received $1.75 million in funding through private donations, according to Phys.org , but is hoping to increase its funding tenfold, Loeb said. The project will involve the creation and coordination of a global network of medium-sized telescopes, cameras and computers. The equipment will be used to examine unidentified flying objects. The project will also involve researchers from Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Caltech and the University of Stockholm.

“We can no longer ignore the possibility that technological civilizations predated us,” Loeb said to reporters at a news conference. “The impact of any discovery of extraterrestrial technology on science, our technology, and on our entire world view, would be enormous,” said Loeb in a statement.

What we know so far about the unclassified Pentagon UFO report

Watershed U.S. UFO report does not rule out extraterrestrial origin

The Galileo Project was announced about a month following the Pentagon report about unidentified aerial phenomena, which indicated the source of the phenomena was unclear.

“What we see in our sky is not something that politicians or military personnel should interpret, because they were not trained as scientists, it’s for the science community to figure out,” Loeb said.

Loeb is a Harvard professor who has published almost 700 research articles and four books. Loeb has collaborated with Stephen Hawking and was the subject of controversy in 2017 for suggesting that an object could have been an alien probe sailing on solar winds, reported Phys.org .

The Galileo Project will also investigate objects that visit our solar system coming from interstellar space, also searching for alien satellites that could potentially be probing Earth.

The project is named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei.

Sacred Journey exhibits rich history of Indigenous canoe culture

Nations and families from far-flung parts of coastal B.C. gathered to launch the Sacred Journey exhibit and celebrate the enduring importance of Indigenous canoe culture that stretches across the Pacific Northwest coast.

The traditional ocean-going canoe, or “Glwa” in the Heiltsuk language, is a way of life, essential to First Nations sustenance, social life, community culture and ceremony, said the exhibit’s executive producer Frank Brown at the Campbell River Museum — the first stop in the show’s five-year tour.

“The story of the ocean-going canoe on the coast is all of our story,” said Brown, of the Heiltsuk Nation, who carries the hereditary hemas (chief) name of Dhadhiyasila (λ.λ.yasila), meaning “preparing for the largest potlatch.”

“The canoe made our society what it is,” he said to the crowd, which included members of the Nuu-chah-nulth and Heiltsuk nations, among others, as well as the hosting nation, the Wei Wai Kum.

“It mobilized us, so we could harvest the abundance of the sea and the land to evolve to be great cultures,” Brown said.

“Our common heritage of the ocean-going canoe, big houses and ceremonies, like the potlatch, is what unifies us as coastal Native people.”

Canoe culture was nearly extinguished by colonialism, but it has made a comeback over the last three decades, particularly through the Tribal Canoe Journeys, which have sped a resurgence of Aboriginal culture and youth empowerment.

The annual event, involving Indigenous nations across the Pacific Northwest coast from Alaska to Oregon, sees paddlers travel hundreds of kilometres to visit sister nations to foster solidarity and cultural exchange.

The Sacred Journey exhibit was developed to share the knowledge and experience of the ocean-going canoe through art, immersive audio, video displays, and interactive experiences from an Indigenous point of view, Brown said.

Its stunning art pieces include a monumental canvas canoe with four prominent Heiltsuk crests in striking colours painted by Heiltsuk artist KC Hall. The works of two other Heiltsuk artists, Chazz Mack and Ian Reid, are also showcased.

Mack designed beautiful and ornate overarching house posts and paddles to accompany the canoe, while Reid carved an eagle-human transformative mask. Renowned artist Roy Henry Vickers created a moon and salmon logo for the exhibit, while Quadra Island metal sculptor Kevin Mackenzie designed a copper bow for the canoe and other detail elements of the display. The interactive audio and video elements of the show were produced by Greencoast Media.

Hopefully, the Sacred Journey exhibit will provide viewers and other Indigenous people who haven’t experienced the transformative power of an ocean-going canoe, said Brown, who as a young man raised funds to carve a traditional canoe, and mobilized others to make a symbolic journey to Expo 86 in Vancouver.

Many people at the opening ceremony spoke of the life-changing effects that being part of the coastal “canoe family” had on them and thousands of youth in their communities.

Kwakwaka’wakw master carver and Wei Wai Kum hereditary Chief Bill Henderson spoke of the joys of carving and travelling in a traditional canoe during a journey to Bella Bella.

“At every stop, there was a feast, and we’d sing songs,” said Henderson, adding a multitude of eagles flying overhead heralded the canoes' arrival in Alert Bay.

“It was all very touching and emotional,” he said.

Shawn Decaire said spontaneously joining a canoe journey in 2001 altered the course of his life — putting him on a better path and forging his identity as an Indigenous man and his relationship to the songs and culture of his nation.

By the end of his journey, Decaire, who loved singing country music, had learned 30 traditional songs.

“And when I came back, I was really influenced to bring culture back to our village with our people,” said Decaire, who lives at Cape Mudge, a We Wai Kai Nation village on Quadra Island.

The fact that the Sacred Journey exhibit, itself a legacy of canoe journeys, will travel the world is monumental and fitting, Decaire said.

The exhibit will be shown at 20 different venues, including Science World, the Canada Science and Technology Museum, the Canadian Canoe Museum, and a number of Indigenous communities south of the border. Brown is hopeful the show will make it to Hawaii, as Indigenous Hawaiians were a mighty canoe-going culture, he said.

Decaire refers to his canoe journey as a shared origin story that will now travel the world as the Sacred Journey exhibit.

“It's ... our rebirth back to what was stolen from us,” he said, adding his family was severed from their traditions through the bitter legacy of residential schools.

“In my generation, we had to fight to be cultural ... today's generation, they have a choice.

“And it's the greatest gift in the world.”

Sacred Journey will be on display at the Campbell River Museum until early November.


Rochelle Baker, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, National Observer

The IMF warned of an uneven global recovery. It just got worse.

bwinck@businessinsider.com (Ben Winck)

Medical workers administer COVID-19 vaccines in Mumbai, India, April 13, 2021. 

Rajanish Kakade/AP

Uneven vaccine rollouts are widening the gap between the recovery's winners and losers, the IMF said.

The IMF lifted its growth forecast for advanced economies and lowered its outlook for developing nations.

The organization warned of a K-shaped rebound just months into the pandemic as COVID slammed major economies.

The gap is widening between the winners and losers of the global COVID-19 recovery, thanks to uneven vaccine access, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday.

The IMF released its outlook for global growth in a new report, maintaining the world economy will grow by 6% this year. The devil, however, is in the details. Growth for advanced economies was revised 0.5 points higher. Conversely, the IMF lowered its estimate for growth in emerging markets and developing economies by 0.5 points.

The two groups will diverge even further through next year, according to the report. While the IMF lifted its 2022 growth estimate to 4.9% from 4.4%, the bulk of the upgrade comes from stronger performances by advanced economies.

It's all about the vaccines

The unevenness comes down to countries' vaccination efforts, Gita Gopinath, economic counselor at the IMF, said in a blog post.

Nearly 40% of the population in advanced economies has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. That compares to just 11% in emerging markets, and an even smaller share in developing nations. As the Delta variant spreads around the world, speeding up vaccine rollouts in lagging countries is key to closing the growth gap, Gopinath said.

The disparity echoes warnings given by the IMF just months into the pandemic's onset. The organization said in April 2020 that the pandemic would power the largest downturn since the Great Depression, and that "no country is safe" until a vaccine was developed. Projections included in the early 2020 report saw advanced economies contracting 6.1% in 2020, reflecting outsized fallout in the US and EU.

However, emerging markets and developing nations only contract 1% as China swiftly rebounded and other countries faced relatively small outbreaks. The group also saw faster growth through 2021 compared to their larger peers, according to the IMF.

Fifteen months later and the script has almost completely flipped. Advanced economies' swift vaccine distribution has led to the easing of restrictions and a rebound in consumer spending. Vaccines' effectiveness against the Delta variant has also helped nations avoid new rounds of crippling lockdowns.

Emerging markets and developing countries are faring far worse. Case counts have surged in recent weeks as the Delta variant proliferates. Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Asia all risk stagnant recoveries should cases rise further, the IMF said.

Gopinath reiterated the need for additional funding to help struggling countries catch up with advanced economies. The IMF aims to spend $50 billion on vaccinating at least 40% of every country's population by the end of 2021 and 60% by mid-2022. Sharing surplus doses and removing trade restrictions to speed up shipments can also help close the vaccination gap, she said.

"Concerted, well-directed policy actions at the multilateral and national levels can make the difference between a future where all economies experience durable recoveries or one where divergences intensify, the poor get poorer, and social unrest and geopolitical tensions grow," Gopinath added.

INSURERS FOR Gun maker offers $33M to settle suit by Sandy Hook families


HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — INSURERS FOR The maker of the rifle used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting has offered some of the victims' families nearly $33 million to settle their lawsuit over how the company marketed the firearm to the public.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Lawyers for now-bankrupt Remington filed the offers late Tuesday in Waterbury Superior Court in Connecticut. The nine families suing the company, who are being offered nearly $3.7 million apiece, are considering the proposals, their lawyers said.

A Hartford lawyer representing Remington, James Rotondo, declined to comment Wednesday. The settlement offers were filed a day after a judge denied Remington's request to dismiss the lawsuit.

A Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle made by Remington was used to kill 20 first graders and six educators at the Newtown, Connecticut, school on Dec. 14, 2012. The 20-year-old gunman, Adam Lanza, killed his mother at their Newtown home before the massacre, then killed himself with a handgun as police arrived at the school.

Relatives of nine victims killed in the shooting say in their lawsuit that Remington should have never sold such a dangerous weapon to the public and allege it targeted younger, at-risk males in marketing and product placement in violent video games. They say their focus is on preventing future mass shootings.

Joshua Koskoff, an attorney for the families, said the settlements were offered by two of Remington's insurers.

“Ironshore and James River ... deserve credit for now realizing that promoting the use of AR-15s as weapons of war to civilians is indefensible. Insuring this kind of conduct is an unprofitable and untenable business model,” Koskoff said in a statement.

Remington's lawyers have denied the lawsuit's allegations. In their request to dismiss the lawsuit, they argued there were no facts presented to establish that Remington's marketing had anything to do with the shooting.

Remington, based in Madison, North Carolina, filed for bankruptcy last year for the second time in two years. Its assets were later sold off to several companies.

Dave Collins, The Associated Press

Spanish physician used children as vaccine fridges to transport smallpox vaccine around the world in 1803

National Post Staff 

JULY 28,2021

When Spanish physician Francisco Javier de Balmis decided to set off to Spain’s colonies in 1803 with the hopes of vaccinating people from smallpox in the Spanish colonies, he was faced a conundrum: how can he transport the vaccines across the Atlantic Ocean?

© Provided by National Post Francisco Javier de Balmis became famous for leading an expedition in 1803 to Spain's then-colonies in Latin America and the Philippines to vaccinate against small pox.

At the time, the refrigerator, now a handy vaccine storage method, hadn’t been invented, forcing people to use old time-tested methods to preserve their foods and other items — cellars, boxes stored indoor or outside and a variety of salting, spicing and pickling methods.

There was no in vitro method that could successfully store the smallpox vaccine, derived by injecting people with cowpox, a bovine cousin of smallpox — for more than 12 days.

So Balmis turned to what, at that time, would have been considered the next best option — children.

According to a new exhibition of documents, on show in Seville, detailing Balmis’ voyage to the colonies in Seville, the physician set off on his expedition from A Coruña in north-west Spain, accompanied by 22 orphans. Isabel Zendal, who ran the orphanage the children belonged to, also came on board, serving as nurse and carer, along with her nine-year-old son.

During the trip, he would inject the cowpox virus into a child. Once that child had developed pustules — skin blisters filled with a transparent fluid — as a symptom of the disease, he would withdraw the serum from a pustule and inject that into the next child, thereby ensuring that the vaccine stays fresh until the end of the trip.

None of the children died from the disease, according to the Guardian .

SLAVERY

On arriving in Mexico, Balmis recruited another 26 children to accompany him on the trip from Acapulco to the Philippines. According to the documents, all 26 children were Mexican boys, aged from four to 14 and had been sold to Balmis by their parents. Some of the boys were described as “Spanish” and others as mestizos (mixed blood).

Three of the boys were listed with unknown parentage, and five other only had their mother’s name appear in their documentation.

The original 22 children stayed in Mexico.

The idea to use children as vaccine transport, while barbaric now, was considered commonplace at the time, the Guardian reported. Edward Jenner, who had first discovered the use of cowpox as a smallpox vaccine, had tested his theory by injecting the virus in an eight-year-old boy.

By the end of Balmis’ voyage, about 300,000 people in the Canaries, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, the Philippines and China were vaccinated for free.

“The strategy adopted by Balmis was a cheap, ingenious and pioneering solution to ensure that the vaccine arrived in the Americas in good condition,” Alberto García-Basteiro, an epidemiologist and associate professor at the University of Barcelona, told the Guardian.

“It’s likely that nowadays the strategy of using children to transport the vaccine would be criticised on ethical grounds, but the impact and benefits of the expedition cannot be denied.”

The exhibition can be viewed at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville and will remain on display until 15 Sept.

LAB LEAK NOT IN CHINA

A Second Person in France May Have Caught Deadly Prion Disease From Lab Exposure


Public research labs in France are temporarily halting their work into prions, after at least two employees are believed to have contracted a rare but universally fatal prion brain disease. One woman has since died, almost certainly after having been exposed during a lab accident in 2010, while the second is reportedly still alive, and it is not yet confirmed whether her illness was caused by lab exposure.

© Photo: Nicolas Asfouri/AFP (Getty Images)

Prions are a type of protein commonly found in the brain. They seem to serve some important but still unclear natural function. But prions can also turn into a misfolded form of themselves, one that slowly turns other “normal” prions around them rogue, too. Over time, this cascading effect spreads throughout the brain and destroys it, leaving behind telltale sponge-like holes that can be spotted under a microscope. Prion diseases are very rare, but there are no available treatments, and people usually die within months to a year of the onset of symptoms, which typically include dementia and motor impairment.

The first case, now known to be a woman named Émilie Jaumain, began experiencing symptoms in late 2017. She was suspected to have variant-Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a form of CJD spread through exposure to prions from other animals. The first cases of vCJD were discovered in the 1990s, after people ate meat from tainted cows and then developed a prion disease, which was given the morbid nickname of mad cow disease. The diagnosis was confirmed in a brain autopsy following Jaumain’s death 19 months later. She was only 33-years-old.

Though there is room for the possibility that Jaumain contracted her vCJD elsewhere, the strongest likelihood by far is that she caught it during a lab accident in May 2010, when she pierced her skin with forceps that were handling frozen, prion-infected brain samples from mice genetically engineered to develop human prions. French researchers reported the tragic case last year.

Jaumain had been working at a lab run by the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), one of France’s public research organizations, when she presumably got exposed. On Tuesday, the INRAE revealed that yet another person working at one of their labs had recently been diagnosed with CJD as well. The discovery of the second case was enough to compel the INRAE and four other public research organizations to impose a three-month moratorium on prion research, while an investigation is ongoing into the circumstances of the second case.

The moratorium “will make it possible to study the possibility of a link between the observed case and the person’s former professional activity,” the INRAE and other organizations said in a joint statement released yesterday.

The woman in the second case, a lab worker, has since retired and is still alive, according to reporting Wednesday from Science Magazine. It’s not known which form of CJD she has, which could be a crucial clue as to the origin of her illness. Most cases of CJD are sporadic, seeming to arise for no specific reason. Some cases are familial, found in people with specific inherited mutations. And vCJD is most often associated with transmission from another animal, typically cows. These forms have noticeably different patterns of presentation, with sporadic cases appearing most often in older people, while vCJD tends to strike younger patients. Theoretically, though, all forms of CJD could be transmitted through close enough exposure to infected brain matter (another prion disease, kuru, infamously spread through cannibalism).

Jaumain’s friends and colleagues have called for far-reaching improvements in lab safety during prion research. They’ve started an advocacy group in the wake of her death called Emilys Association, while her family is currently pursuing criminal and administrative legal action against the INRAE over her death. While the specific lab she worked at was cleared of wrongdoing by several investigations, according to Science, her family’s lawyers contend that there have long been inadequate safety measures taken during this dangerous work in the country’s research facilities. Should this new case turn out to be lab-related, they may have a point.

AFP

‘Disinfo kills’: protesters demand Facebook act to stop vaccine falsehoods

Activists place body bags at company’s Washington HQ

False information on vaccines shared widely on network

Protesters are urging Facebook’s shareholders to ban misinformation ‘superspreaders’. Photograph: Eric Kayne/AP

Kari Paul in San Francisco
Wed 28 Jul 2021 

Activists descended on Facebook’s Washington headquarters on Wednesday to demand the company take stronger action against vaccine falsehoods spreading on its platform, covering the area in front of Facebook’s office with body bags that read “disinfo kills”.


‘A systemic failure’: vaccine misinformation remains rampant on Facebook, experts say

The day of protest, which comes as Covid cases surge in the US, has been organized by a group of scholars, advocates and activists calling themselves the “Real” Oversight Board. The group is urging Facebook’s shareholders to ban so-called misinformation “superspreaders” – the small number of accounts responsible for the majority of false and misleading content about the Covid-19 vaccines.

“People are making decisions based on the disinformation that’s being spread on Facebook,” said Shireen Mitchell, Member of the Real Facebook Oversight Board and founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women. “If Facebook is not going to take that down, or if all they’re going to do is put out disclaimers, then fundamentally Facebook is participating in these deaths as well.”

In coordination with the protest, the Real Oversight Board has released a new report analyzing the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the company’s most recent financial quarter. The report and protest also come as Facebook prepares to announce its financial earnings for that same quarter.

The report references a March study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) that found a small group of accounts – known as the “dirty dozen” – is responsible for more than 73% of anti-vaccine content across social media platforms, including Facebook. That report recently drew attention from the White House, and Joe Biden has condemned Facebook and other tech companies for failing to take action.

Facebook banned misinformation about vaccines from the platform in February of 2021, but critics say many posts slip through the platform’s filters and reach audiences of millions without being removed.

At Facebook’s Washington DC headquarters, activists lay body bags that read “disinfo kills”. Photograph: Eric Kayne/AP

It also has introduced a number of rules relating to Covid-19 specifically, banning posts that question the severity of the disease, deny its existence, or argue that the vaccine has more risks than the virus. Still, the Real Oversight Board found that often such content has been able to remain on the platform and even make its way into the most-shared posts.

According to the Real Oversight Board’s report, a large share of the misinformation about the Covid vaccines comes from a few prolific accounts, and continues to be among the platform’s best performing and most widely shared content. It analyzed the top 10 posts on each weekday over the last quarter and found the majority of those originated from just five identified “superspreaders” of misinformation.

“When it comes to Covid disinformation, the vast majority of content comes from an extremely small group of highly visible users, making it far easier to combat it than Facebook admits,” the board said, concluding that Facebook is “continuing to profit from hate and deadly disinformation”.

The group has called on Facebook to remove the users from the platform or alter its algorithm to disable engagement with the offending accounts. Facebook did not immediately respond to request for comment, but has stated in the past it has removed more than 18m pieces of Covid misinformation.

Congress has also taken note of the spread of vaccine misinformation on Facebook and other platforms, with the Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar introducing a bill that would target platforms whose algorithms promotes health misinformation related to an “existing public health emergency”.

The bill, called the Health Misinformation Act, would remove protections provided by the internet law Section 230, which prevent platforms from being sued over content posted by their users in such cases.

“For far too long, online platforms have not done enough to protect the health of Americans,” Klobuchar said in a statement on the bill. “These are some of the biggest, richest companies in the world, and they must do more to prevent the spread of deadly vaccine misinformation.”