An international Covid-19 network founded by former UCD professor Dolores Cahill has almost doubled in reach on Facebook this year, despite pledges by the social media giant to tackle pandemic-related misinformation.
The World Doctors Alliance (WDA) was relatively unknown at the start of the pandemic, with only 3,500 following its members Facebook pages in January 2020.
By July 1st, 2021, that figure had grown to 460,179, a more than 13,000 per cent increase. The group was founded as an offshoot of another conspiracy theory group, the World Freedom Alliance, of which Ms Cahill is President.
The WDA is made up of 12 academics and doctors, including three who have been struck off or suspended.
Its members have made many outlandish claims about Covid-19 and other diseases.
Dr Andrew Kaufman, an American psychiatrist, said “demon possession may actually be a factor in some mental illness” while Dutch GP Dr Elke De Klerk has claimed those taking the Covid-19 vaccine will “officially become the property of Microsoft.”
Ms Cahill, who ceased her employment as a UCD professor earlier this year, has claimed children who wear facemasks will have a lower IQ and that Covid is far less serious than claimed by medical authorities.
This week, a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which monitors online misinformation shows the reach of WDA members has continued to increase in 2021, even after social media companies promised to remove misleading Covid-19 content.
The Facebook pages of WDA members have a combined follower count of over 550,000. Their pages have amassed 5.77 million interactions since January 2020, with frquency increasing by 85 per cent in the first six months of 2020.
Posts mentioning the WDA or its members have received over 3 million engagements and appeared in at least 46 different languages, the report found.
‘Failing to take action’
“Facebook will come out and say they take these issues seriously. But this makes it pretty obvious they are failing to take action. There’s either a lack of will, or a lack of ability, or both,” said ISD researcher Aoife Gallagher.
She said the WDA is a particular concern as its members use their credentials to give the false impression they are reliable sources of information.
“It manipulates people’s trust in doctors and healthcare providers, which traditionally people would have a high level of trust in.”
The WDA is one of a number of groups founded by Ms Cahill which have been used to spread misinformation on the virus both in Ireland and abroad.
A factchecking system used by Facebook often fails to stop misinformation being shared and is easy to bypass in languages other than English, the ISD found.
Claims made by Ms Cahill on Facebook have been fact-checked 75 times and routinely found to contain false and misleading content that violates Facebook’s policies yet her page remains active. She currently has 129,216 followers, making her the third most high profile member of the WDA.
While some videos containing misinformation are removed or labelled as false by Facebook, users can simply take clips from the videos and reupload them without consequences.
For example, an interview Ms Cahill gave to a prominent US-based conspiracy theorist in May 2020 was fact-checked by four different news agencies in both English and Spanish but clips from the video continued to appear regularly, according to the ISD research.
Facebook claims to target misinformation “with a very high degree of precision” but, according to ISD “videos that have barely been edited and are uploaded locally to the platform are still being missed by the company’s labelling and moderation efforts”.
A Facebook company spokesman pointed to efforts by the company to address Covid misinformation including the removal of 20 million posts and the fact-checking of 190 million more.
Neither Ms Cahill or the WDA returned a request for comment.
