Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer has been accused of spreading misinformation about vaccines amid the growing concern for e-commerce platforms. Reports indicate that 10.47 percent of the search results on the platform ends in misinformative health products. A study conducted by the University of Washington has found that a large number of health products hosted by Amazon presents misinformation to the users, leading to controversies. Books, ebooks, health, personal care, and apparel products are included in this category. The findings come amidst growing criticisms against Amazon regarding the regulation of health-related products on its platform. The study published at arXiv.org shows that a dataset of 4,997 products in Amazon elucidates for health misinformation. The study was conducted to determine the amount of misinformation returned by the search and recommendation algorithms of Amazon. They also investigated the role of personalization in amplifying misinformation. For this, consequences of personalization due to account-history was examined, which was constructed by performing various real-world user actions. It involved two sets of algorithmic audits for vaccine misinformation on the search and recommendations algorithms of Amazon. It has been detected that the search algorithms on Amazon promote books with false claims on vaccines over the ones that debunk misleading health information. The study apprises that search results for numerous vaccine-related queries are directing to misinformative products thus generating misinformation bias. It also exposed the weakness of Amazon in ranking the misinformative products higher than that of debunking products. The research also identifies the importance of the filter bubble effect on recommendations. This attributes the users who are performing any actions related to misinformative products with the ability to view more misinformation in their homepages, pre-purchase recommendations, and product recommendations. A report from VentureBeat suggests that Amazon through a recent blog post during 2020 reviewed about 10,000 product listings and over two million of the products that violated its controversial or offensive guidelines have been removed from its listing. Amazon’s recommendation algorithms further redirect customers who are engaging with products espousing bogus science to additional health misinformation. Recent accusations against Amazon on Vaccine misinformation strengthens the controversies regarding the covid vaccine.
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