Users of Doximity, which has long described itself as a LinkedIn for doctors, find their news feed inundated with anti-vaccine comments from fellow physicians
Ari Levy / CNBC : Tweets: @thehowie , @levynews , @yoda , @yoda , @mrbrownsir , and @mattrosoff Tweets: @thehowie : Let's make one thing clear: most of us use or have used @doximity for scheduling. I am on various social media. Have NEVER relied on Doximity. And they won't get me on there if they don't fix this. https://www.cnbc.com/... Ari Levy / @levynews : Vaccine misinformation is a growing problem for Doximity, which went public in June and is now worth $10 bln. “You rarely get to the level of microchips in vaccines, but a lot of this stuff is pretty close to it.” https://www.cnbc.com/... Drew Olanoff / @yoda : and this is exactly what should happen when a company allows, and in turn encourages, dangerous spread of misinformation. https://twitter.com/... Drew Olanoff / @yoda : this level of information warfare is horrifying https://www.cnbc.com/... Matt Brown / @mrbrownsir : “What do you call the person who graduated last in their class from med school? Doctor.” And those doctors are on Doximity https://twitter.com/... Matt Rosoff / @mattrosoff : It's not just Facebook and LinkedIn that are full of antivax conspiracy theories. They're overrunning Doximity, a social network for doctors, too. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after its IPO filing promised doctors a 15% allocation of shares off revenue that grew 78% to $206.9M in 2020, Doximity's core product premise — a trusted, verified professional network for physicians — is colliding with its own content layer: the news feed is filling with anti-vaccine commentary from the very credentialed users the verification was supposed to vouch for.
The playbook problem is familiar: Instagram's search results were already dominated by vaccine conspiracy theories amplified by its recommendation algorithms in 2020, while doctors organized their own verifiable-source frameworks on Twitter and TikTok. Doximity is discovering that physician identity checks filter who posts, not what is true.
First-order effects
- Physicians who use Doximity mainly for scheduling and networking are publicly threatening to abandon the platform unless moderation changes — directly threatening engagement for a company valued at $10B weeks into its public life.
- The 15% of IPO shares allocated to doctors means many of the users posting and objecting are also shareholders, entangling the brand-damage debate with investor sentiment.
Second-order effects
- Rival professional networks like LinkedIn can position themselves as the lower-risk venue for medical professionals, pressuring Doximity to invest in feed moderation it has so far treated as out of scope for a credential-gated network.
- Hospitals and pharmaceutical marketers weighing Doximity as an advertising channel gain a new diligence question — whether the feed amplifies misinformation — that could slow monetization of its physician audience.
Third-order effects
- If verification-based platforms keep inheriting consumer-style moderation burdens, the industry-wide claim that identity gating substitutes for content governance collapses, inviting the same regulatory attention aimed at consumer social networks.
- Doctors' self-organized source-verification efforts on public platforms may migrate toward credentialing bodies, shifting responsibility for medical misinformation from platforms to professional institutions.
The trend: Verified-identity professional networks are absorbing the misinformation problems once assumed unique to open consumer platforms, forcing them to choose between curation costs and the trust their valuation depends on.