Facebook's anti-vax carrot emoji, explained – Mashable

This is why your uncle has carrot emojis in his Twitter handle. No amount of carrots will ever bring eyesight to the blind. Credit: Sergnester via Getty To avoid censorship for the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, anti-vax groups on Facebook have begun coding their messages with the carrot emoji, according to a report from the BBC. The emoji is used in place of the word “vaccine” to avoid the wrath of Facebook’s automated moderator algorithms.The BBC reports that these groups often share unverified claims of people being killed or injured by the COVID-19 vaccine. One group with over 200,000 members states in its rules that members must “use code words for everything” and that posters cannot “use the c word, v word or b word ever” (covid, vaccine, booster). According to the BBC, the algorithm the Meta-owned platform uses for moderation tends to focus on words, not images. This is unsurprising news. Back in July 2021, a Bloomberg report detailed how social media algorithms perform poorly in detecting abuse through emojis.Marc Owen Jones, a disinformation researcher and associate professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, was invited to join one such group and shared the group’s “very odd” attempt…
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