BBC Boasts it Got Vaccine Injured Support Group With 250,000 Members Removed From Facebook

The BBC has boasted that it triggered the removal of a Facebook vaccine injury support group with over 250,000 members.

The BBC has seen several groups, one with hundreds of thousands of members, in which the [carrot] emoji appears in place of the word ‘vaccine’. Facebook’s algorithms tend to focus on words rather than images. The groups are being used to share unverified claims of people being either injured or killed by vaccines.

Once the BBC alerted Facebook’s parent company, Meta, the groups were removed.

“We have removed this group for violating our harmful misinformation policies and will review any other similar content in line with this policy. We continue to work closely with public health experts and the U.K. Government to further tackle Covid vaccine misinformation,” the firm said in a statement.

However, the groups have since reappeared in our searches.

One group we saw has been around for three years but rebranded itself to focus on vaccine stories, from being a group for sharing “banter, bets and funny videos” in August 2022.

The rules of the very large group state: “Use code words for everything.” It adds: “Do not use the c word, v word or b word ever” (Covid, vaccine, booster). It was created more than a year ago and has more than 250,000 members.

Marc Owen-Jones, a disinformation researcher, and associate professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, was invited to join it.

“It was people giving accounts of relatives who had died shortly after having the COVID-19 vaccine”, he said. “But instead of using the words ‘COVID-19’ or ‘vaccine’, they were using emojis of carrots.

“Initially I was a little confused. And then it clicked – that it was being used as a way of evading, or apparently evading, Facebook’s fake news detection algorithms.”

I wonder if Parliament’s champion of the vaccine injured Sir Christopher Chope has anything to say about this? He is just about to launch a new All Party Parliamentary Group on COVID-19 Vaccine Damage.

The BBC helpfully explains that the ONS stated the risk of fatal vaccine injury last year – thus implying these people must all be wrong, or at least ought not to be allowed to talk to one another.

In 2021 data from the Office for National Statistics suggested that there was a one in 5 million risk of dying from the Covid vaccine, compared with a risk of 35,000 deaths per five million of dying from Covid itself, if unvaccinated.

Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, these figures are correct, they are not broken down by age and only cover deaths not injuries. A recent study by Dr. Peter Doshi and colleagues found that in the vaccine trials the vaccines were more likely to cause serious injury than prevent it. A recent paper from Oxford, Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities similarly found that in young adults aged 18-30 the vaccines were 18-98 times more likely to cause serious injury than prevent it. The BBC and Facebook, on the other hand, don’t believe that these injuries exist, or at least that the injured should be allowed to speak to one another and seek mutual support.

Is that why these people pay their licence fee – so the BBC can go round banning their support groups?

Facebook says it removes content which claims vaccines are more dangerous than the disease they protect against. But what if that’s what the evidence shows? Will it remove peer-reviewed scientific studies that go against its policy?

“And yet it moves…”

BBC Boasts it Got Vaccine Injured Support Group With 250,000 Members Removed From Facebook

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

5 Responses to “BBC Boasts it Got Vaccine Injured Support Group With 250,000 Members Removed From Facebook”

  1. newensign says:

    This is interesting Weaver, I think they have shot themselves in the foot by saying “We have removed this group for violating OUR harmful misinformation policies”. In other words the anti-vaxxers are telling the ruth and breaking the BBC’s lies!! The “our” should not be there.

  2. Weaver says:

    I totally agree newensign the BBC deserves to have the lack of respect from viewers which is shown through more people than ever not paying their TV license fee.

    • ian says:

      Only the internet free watch the BBC. I’ve just unintentionally made up a slogan. A “lady”, along the road from me, known as Irish Tracy, and worse things, once interrupted a conversation which I was having about the Great Reset with Tubby, her next door neighbour. “You should look at Snopes you should, spreading all that clap trap”, or words to that effect with a few f words added. I replied, courteously, that I’d check it out. My only point here is, she has two friends who are never away from her house Tib a lady who I was at primary school with, and couldn’t spell her name or tie her shoe laces till she was 12, and Willie, a nice enough guy who lives alone with only ordinary TV no internet or phone.

      These are the BBC audiences.

    • newensign says:

      Yes indeed weaver, I stopped watching TV 20 years ago, but I still get pestered by them to pay the TV License fee. I just return them all, as they address me as “occupier” which I an not as this is a military term for you occupy something that does not belong to you!!

  3. Weaver says:

    That sounds pretty troubling Ian I have always felt that a lot of people are unwilling to do any research themselves but prefer to be told information.