How the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in the Misinformation Age

[steven36]

Misinformation has exploded during the pandemic, spreading faster and further than ever before. How do we slow down a lie?

 

 

How fast does a lie travel? Cordell Hull, the longest-serving US Secretary of State and "father of the United Nations," thought he'd worked it out. "A lie will gallop halfway round the world," he proclaimed in 1948, "before the truth has time to pull its breeches on." 

 

Hull shared his adage in a time before social media, before satellites and smartphones. There were no tweets. No Facebook posts. He couldn't have known the rise of the internet and a worldwide pandemic would expose a critical flaw in his aphorism some 70 years later.

 

In 2020, a lie circles the world countless times before the truth has a chance to hit "Post." 

 

At no time has that been more obvious than during coronavirus pandemic. Since it emerged in December 2019, COVID-19 has infected 33 million people and killed more than 1 million. It's also revealed significant failures in the way we consume and share information. At the center of this fight: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube -- the most popular digital platforms in the world. "There's been this explosion of mis- and disinformation spreading via social media," says Axel Bruns, a digital media researcher at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. 

 

On one front, we've battled a virus. On the other, we've battled misinformation.

 

Efforts by social media giants to manage the deluge of misinformation have largely fallen short. Coronavirus conspiracy theories infect every corner of the web, driven by frenzied Facebook posts and fatalistic tweets. YouTube has struggled to contain the spread of misleading videos about vaccination, microchips and Bill Gates. The science we rely on to inform the pandemic response has, at times, been distorted by rushed reporting. Incremental updates to public health information have muddied messaging across all of the biggest social networks. 

 

We live in the Misinformation Age. 

 

Misinformation is not a new problem. Some predicted the risk of viral misinformation long before COVID-19 emerged. But the biggest health crisis in a century has underscored the ease with which doubt can be sown online. "It's an order of magnitude bigger than anything we've seen before," Bruns says. Digital media researchers, psychologists and informatics specialists are beginning to grapple with the extent of our misinformation problem. With a presidential election looming in the US, there's now a heightened sense of urgency. We must learn to slow down a lie.

On science

During the pandemic, the pace of scientific research has accelerated dramatically. 

 

As scientists were just starting to grapple with the severity of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, they began probing its genome for clues to where it originated and why it was so infectious. At the end of January, an alarming paper appeared online. A team of researchers suggested the genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 showed similarities to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. 

 

The study was a "preprint," scientific literature that has not been peer-reviewed, posted to a server known as bioRxiv that houses preliminary research. Preprints don't generally make a huge splash in the media or online. But shortly after being posted, it was shared by Eric Feigl-Ding, a Harvard public health researcher who became a prominent coronavirus commentator on Twitter. He tweeted the HIV study to around 60,000 followers, calling it "very intriguing." 

 

Except it wasn't intriguing. It was junk. Feigl-Ding's tweet and bioRxiv were flooded with comments pointing out the study's flaws. Jason Weir, a biological scientist at the University of Toronto, said it only took "10 minutes to determine this was not serious science." But the study hit social media just as discredited conspiracy theories about the virus being a "bioweapon" first appeared. The two stories became entangled. A brief panic ensued. A day after the study appeared, the authors withdrew it, but it remains the most downloaded preprint ever, with almost 1 million downloads.

 

Science is self-correcting, slow and methodical. Studies are repeated multiple times before they're accepted as fact. Accumulated evidence leads to widely accepted conclusions. That process worked with the HIV study, but it also exposed a significant blindspot: Social media could send shoddy research viral before researchers can adequately review it. 

 

The rapid sharing of COVID-19 study results, preprints, news reports and press releases has enabled preliminary research to spread further than ever before, even when it's misleading or overtly false. This kind of science is "simply not ready for prime-time consumption," according to Gary Schwitzer, a health journalist and founder of medical consumer watchdog site HealthNewsReview. 

 

Science isn't failing, but scientists are "drowning" in COVID-19 papers, making it difficult to dedicate time to adequately examine new research and counter false claims. Over 30 studies related to COVID-19 have been retracted in the past 10 months. Preprints, like the HIV study, make up 11 of those retractions. Other controversial studies, some of which include questionable data and have informed public health decisions in the pandemic, have not been withdrawn.

 

When slipshod claims spread on social media, they get distorted further, making it "harder for scientists to control their messages," says Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University. The HIV study has been scrubbed from the academic literature, but six months later it still gets shared on Twitter and Facebook as if it appeared yesterday. 

On conspiracy

Sometimes, a lie can start a fire.

 

Fears about phone radiation date back to early rollouts of wireless technology at the turn of the century. When wireless carriers announced the next-gen mobile technology 5G, panic over the potential health concerns reignited. But the coronavirus pandemic helped 5G fears mutate into something more sinister. 

 

The convergence of two confusing, unknown entities -- a new virus and a new technology -- created a new myth. "There was already a distrust of the technology and, as COVID-19 emerged, social media users slowly started to link the two together," says Wasim Ahmed, a social media researcher at Newcastle University in the UK. 

 

Some falsely claimed 5G was weakening people's immune systems. Others suggested lockdowns were a cover for the installation of 5G towers, allowing governments to wirelessly control the public's minds. Ahmed, and other researchers, found that every time you cut one head off the conspiracy Hydra, two more grew back.

 

The 5G conspiracy resulted in the deliberate destruction of mobile towers across the globe. Telco workers were subject to verbal and physical abuse by those who viewed them as complicit in 5G's spread. In Birmingham, England, one of the 5G masts providing services to a COVID-19 hospital was ruined, preventing communication between the sick and their family members.

 

An investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation traced the 5G conspiracy back to a tweet posted on Jan. 19. A week later, notorious right-wing conspiracy channel Infowars boosted the false claims. On April 1, actor Woody Harrelson posted a video to his more than 2 million Instagram followers showing a communications tower ablaze and claiming Chinese citizens were "bringing 5G antennas down." Harrelson had been fooled. The video originated from the Hong Kong protests of 2019. It had nothing to do with 5G. 

 

Celebrities like Harrelson became super-spreaders, sharing various forms of 5G misinformation on personal social media pages to huge audiences. On April 4, rapper Wiz Khalifa shared a tweet that simply asked "Corona? 5G? Or both?" with 36 million followers. Google Trends show searches for "5G coronavirus" peaked in the week following the pair's posts.

On April 6, Facebook and YouTube began removing misinformation regarding 5G and COVID-19. But the myths had been seeded as early as February. Ahmed suggests social media networks were "a bit slow" in dealing with misleading posts. It was too late. 

On politics

One drug has dominated the increasingly polarized discourse during the pandemic: hydroxychloroquine. The antimalarial, in use for over 50 years, has been championed widely as a coronavirus quick fix but remains an enigmatic compound.

 

"Its exact mechanism of action isn't completely understood," says Ian Wicks, a clinician and rheumatologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia. 

Hydroxychloroquine was thrust into the limelight when President Donald Trump touted the drug as having the potential "to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine."

 

Later, on May 18, he admitted he had been taking it as a preventative. The scientific consensus is at odds with Trump. "We have so many trials showing that it does not work for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19," says Jinoos Yazdany, a rheumatologist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. It didn't matter. Hydroxychloroquine had become a political ideology. 

 

 

And it continued to be championed. In July, a group of lab coat-clad doctors promoted hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 "cure" in a Facebook livestream. The event, covered predominantly by right-wing news publications like Breitbart, led to a second wave of misinformation more potent and widespread than the first. Trump himself retweeted a short clip of the doctors, doubling down on his earlier comments. Pro-Trump accounts on social media networks like Twitter and Facebook quickly spread it further. 

 

Wicks, who is evaluating hydroxychloroquine's potential as a preventative against COVID-19 infection, notes his clinical trials have "been made more difficult by the politicization of the issue." Politicization has become a common theme across social media. A study in the journal Science Advances in July showed "a substantial partisan divide" in how the pandemic got communicated by Republicans and Democrats on Twitter. Trump has publicly downplayed the need for face coverings, for instance, while many prominent Democrats made sure to wear them in public.

 

The doubt-mongering surrounding hydroxychloroquine followed an old pattern seen in previous health controversies, such as the bans on tobacco smoke and pesticide use. Political agendas were placed above public health concerns. Misinformation was rampant and, at times, used to deceive and disorient. Social media made it much easier to spread the confusion, Oreskes notes. 

On harmful BS

It's impossible to single out one aspect of the pandemic as the root cause for our disordered relationship with truth. Traditional media has helped propagate some of the most outrageous conspiracy theories, extreme outlets polarize the public discourse and President Trump himself has been blamed as the major cause of health misinformation during the pandemic.

 

But in all of the examples above, and dozens more, social media is a pervasive thread, the horse that gallops lies around the world before truth has time to pull its breeches on.

This isn't a revelatory conclusion. The 2016 US presidential election demonstrated how social networks could be used to deliver hoaxes and falsehoods to potentially millions of people at the click of a mouse. Platforms like Facebook and Google said they'd clamp down on misinformation, but it's only gotten worse. 

 

"Technology enables the spread of misinformation in a way that wasn't possible before," says Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge. News doesn't come from a TV station or a local paper anymore -- now it comes from your ill-informed uncle.

 

Source

[mp68terr]

Did not find info (does it mean that there are any?) regarding legal actions against those spreading dis/mis-information. In such risk-free situation, who cares to spread lies?

[steven36]

1 hour ago, mp68terr said:

Did not find info (does it mean that there are any?) regarding legal actions against those spreading dis/mis-information. In such risk-free situation, who cares to spread lies?

People   in general care and that causes sites  that allowing  people to spread lies to care when there Advertiser's Boycott them so  they ban  people off there platform  and other sites profit from  there loss  like  Snapchat . One mans loss is another mans gain.   As far  as tech is concern  most of these Tech companies   are in for a rude awaking  since  this Virus hit , because  soon the  relief money is going to run out and   it going take more than just PR  that mostly just fake words  to sell  there products . Many of the winners that come out on top won't be the Big Tech sites that caused this shit storm and allowing it to breed in the 1st place  every since  these   sites  existed  they breed misinformation  and hate but the world  has changed  so there just hanging on by a ban hammer. 💀

[mp68terr]

12 minutes ago, steven36 said:

Advertiser's Boycott

Indeed, economic/financial action (and even sanction), but was wondering about legal action. Maybe none.

[steven36]

16 minutes ago, mp68terr said:

Indeed, economic/financial action (and even sanction), but was wondering about legal action. Maybe none.

Legal action in the US  is coming to some of the sites  and its going to  cause change and depending on the outcome of it on what the EU does to them. If  the left gets in next month  it's just going to be worse for them because there  trying to stop disinformation  on tech platforms the right wants to do something about them being biased  its  something all sides  agree on something has to be done  to change things.   But your not going see  no change for a  long while because  legal battles  take years .