The paper "Quantifying the Impact of Misinformation and Vaccine-Skeptical Content on Facebook" by Jennifer Allen, Duncan J. Watts, and David G. Rand examines the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on vaccination intentions in the US. The authors combine lab experiments, crowdsourcing, and machine learning to estimate the causal effect of 13,206 vaccine-related URLs on the vaccination intentions of 233 million Facebook users. They find that the impact of misinformation flagged by fact-checkers was 46 times less than that of unflagged content that encouraged vaccine skepticism. The study highlights the need to scrutinize factually accurate but potentially misleading content, as well as outright falsehoods, to effectively combat vaccine hesitancy. The findings suggest that policies targeting only fact-checked misinformation may not be sufficient to address the broader societal impact of misinformation on public health.The paper "Quantifying the Impact of Misinformation and Vaccine-Skeptical Content on Facebook" by Jennifer Allen, Duncan J. Watts, and David G. Rand examines the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on vaccination intentions in the US. The authors combine lab experiments, crowdsourcing, and machine learning to estimate the causal effect of 13,206 vaccine-related URLs on the vaccination intentions of 233 million Facebook users. They find that the impact of misinformation flagged by fact-checkers was 46 times less than that of unflagged content that encouraged vaccine skepticism. The study highlights the need to scrutinize factually accurate but potentially misleading content, as well as outright falsehoods, to effectively combat vaccine hesitancy. The findings suggest that policies targeting only fact-checked misinformation may not be sufficient to address the broader societal impact of misinformation on public health.