Yet again a popular show is giving an anti-vaxxer a high-profile platform to spread lies and cause harm to an audience of millions. This time it’s Bill Maher who last week hosted Jay Gordon, a controversial doctor who peddles misinformation about vaccines and is best known for providing hundreds of personal belief exemptions for families to forgo school vaccine requirements.
The 14-minute interview on Real Time with Bill Maher doubled down on all the dangerous views we’ve heard before: highlighting discredited work on vaccines and autism, disingenuously labelling measles a benign illness, and questioning a vaccine schedule that has been proven safe and effective by decades of research.
Like many who work in science and medicine, I am exasperated. How does this keep happening? Why do people keep giving snake-oil salesmen a microphone? And how can anti-vaxxers keep telling us the same obvious lies without shame, when they have been debunked and factchecked time and time again?
The answer to all my questions is simply that lying works. It’s a deliberate strategy. When anti-vaxxers are in the spotlight, we tend to focus on factchecking them, which is a natural reaction. But we should be paying more attention to the systemic strategies they use to spread their misinformation.
Ever heard of “firehosing”? It’s a relatively new term coined by Rand researchers Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews in 2016 to describe the propaganda tactics Russian authorities use to quell dissent and control the political landscape. The term has since been applied to the authoritarian behavior of leaders in the US, Brazil and the Philippines.
What does this have to do with anti-science talkshows? So far, the concept of firehosing has only been applied to political propaganda. But I think there are many lessons here for those tracking areas of science denial such as vaccines and climate crisis.
Firehosing relies on pushing out as many lies as possible as frequently as possible. That’s typical for propaganda, but the aspect that makes firehosing a unique strategy is that it doesn’t require the propagandist to make the lies believable. That seems counterintuitive, but as Carlos Maza of Vox explains, firehosing is effective because its goal isn’t to persuade. It’s to rob facts of their power. Firehosing inundates us with so many wild opinions that it becomes exhausting to continually disprove them. In this scenario, reality is reduced to positioning and who can sell their position best.
The strategy is effective for those trying to hold on to political power, and it’s the same for those who gain power from engaging in science denial. Anti-vax influencers such as Jay Gordon and Andrew Wakefield can keep repeating disproved claims – and in the case of Wakefield, doing so despite having had his medical license revoked – because their lying effectively debases reality and gains them followers and fame in the process. It’s the same for media personalities such as Bill Maher, who grow an audience and build a powerful brand by taking up outsider positions, regardless of whether those positions go against all objective evidence.
It is important to acknowledge that not everyone who takes anti-vaccination stances is participating in firehosing. Many concerned parents are victims of this disinformation tactic. Much of our anger online is often directed at targeted communities; we should instead cast our rage at those who profit and gain power from spreading lies about vaccines.
How do we combat firehosing? There is no silver bullet, and we are still learning about this new phenomenon, but the researchers at Rand do make several suggestions. They emphasize that factchecking alone is ineffective: “Don’t expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth.” Instead, it is better to forewarn audiences about the methods that propagandists use to manipulate public opinion.
Another counter-strategy is to disrupt the flow of disinformation. For instance, public pressure earlier this year prompted tech companies like Facebook and YouTube to remove false anti-vaccine content from their platforms. For more traditional platforms like television, audiences can similarly push networks to withdraw their support and talkshow guests to withdraw their participation. The media community could also create stronger accountability and self-regulation systems, a practice that has proven effective in Finland.
It might be tempting to write off personalities like Maher as eccentric and out of touch, and to leave them alone for fear of feeding the fire. I get that. After all, some studies show that repeating a lie, even to refute it, can help ingrain a false claim rather than dispel it. However, we cannot afford to be in denial about the power of science denial. When anti-vaxxers are in the spotlight, we need to expose the strategies they use for their own selfish benefit.
When propagandists are left alone to spread their shameless lies, they gain wealth, fame and power – at the cost of public health, the environment and human rights. We need to take that power away, and the best way to do that is by clogging the firehose.
