Recipes of Infodemic
Algorithms can worsen the effects of fake news. They direct
people further into pages and sources of misinformation. These pages are usually visited and commented on by other like-minded people. We often believe content that we receive from our close ones without questioning it.
The images are illustrational. They may or may not be in context with the text.
Bill Gates (creator of Microsoft) has been the target and victim of many
fake news about the coronavirus. There have been claims that he has created the coronavirus in a lab or that he came up with coronavirus as a cover in order to plant microchips in people. He himself responded to these claims by saying that he was very surprised of these "crazy" theories.
COVID-19 is a type of virus that was identified for the first time in
December 2019. The virus spreads through another infected person, usually through the respiratory route; by sneezing, breathing, coughing, etc. The most common symptoms are fever, headache, persistent cough, and loss of taste and smell. The coronavirus has caused a worldwide pandemic that has lead to many
changes in the world. Infodemic is one of those phenomena.
Detoxes, vitamins, e-courses, or books on COVID prevention. Leaders are not only intentionally spreading misinformation, but trying to profit from the sale of “detoxes” and vitamins they claim will prevent COVID-19, or they have books or e-courses to promote. It is propaganda, and an effective marketing campaign to make money off the vulnerable and vaccine-hesitant.
Harrison, et al, (The Observer, 2021) found Facebook was allowing users to profit from the spread of potentially dangerous misinformation about the pandemic and vaccines, including deploying money-raising tools on pages with content flagged up by the social media giant’s own fact-checkers.
An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found 430 pages followed by 45 million people using Facebook’s tools, including virtual “shops” and fan subscriptions while spreading false information about Covid-19 or vaccinations.
Echo chambers are spaces or environments on the internet (in this case)
where information that reflects a user's existing beliefs is encountered and repeated. This is a phenomenon that is made possible by algorithms. During the coronavirus pandemic, they have been used to spread misinformation; people get stuck on one specific point of view without encountering alternatives, which can lead to profound effects on the user.
Facebook has been generally known to be a common ground for
spreading misinformation (2016 US Presidential election campaign and the UK and EU referendum). Facebook and other social media platforms made a promise for the UK government back in 2020 that companies nor individuals should profit from coronavirus misinformation and that these companies should try and tackle the issue by creating more effective responses against the misinformation. Nevertheless, there are accounts that are spreading and profiting from coronavirus misinformation that remain untouched by Facebook.
Government. There has been a lot of text messages spreading
around that claim to be from the government. The most popular ones have been messages that claim that people will get fined if they leave the house and messages from "HMRC" that announce a benefit that is given to people for the disruption of the coronavirus. There has been only one authentic text message that the public has received from the government which was about the new rules of the lockdown.
Hhydroxychloroquine is a medicine used to treat and prevent
malaria and other diseases such as lupus. It was tested early on for treating COVID-19 patients but was found unbeneficial or even harmful for the patients. However, politicians such as Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump promoted this drug on social media even though there was no evidence at the time of its efficiency.
Jair Bolsonaro is the president of Brazil. He has been a significant
source of coronavirus misinformation. In general, he downplayed the effects of the virus and told Brazilians not to follow social distancing. He has also avidly shared misleading advice on social media that other non-relevant drugs would help with the virus.
Lab leak theory is a theory that the coronavirus was leaked from a
Chinese laboratory. There has been some unambiguity from China when explaining the origins of coronavirus. This has resulted in the speculation of the lab leak theory, that for example, Trump supports. However, there is no evidence for this theory and it would need further investigation to get to the root of this question.
Micro identifiers. The BBC looked into some of the most widely shared false vaccine claims from alleged plots to put microchips into people to the supposed re-engineering of our genetic code. 'Altered DNA' claims - The fear that a vaccine will somehow change your DNA is one they have seen aired regularly on social media.
Nhs (National health service of the United Kindom). There has
been several pieces of fake news and fake messages that claim to be from the NHS. Perhaps the most mischievous fraud that has been circulating is a fake message where the victims have received an invitation to the coronavirus vaccine. When you click the link in the message and fill out the form, the criminals receive your personal information and can exploit this in committing other frauds. The NHS is trying to fight the infodemic together with different social media companies.
Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is a vaccine against Covid19 that was
developed together with the Oxford University and a biopharmaceutical business
AstraZeneca. It is a two-dose vaccine and it has a 76% efficacy rate according to a primary analysis by AstraZeneca.
There has been a lot of misleading social media posts where people state that this vaccine is lethal and that the government is hiding these death cases. Even though there are some side effects (like often in any vaccine), the benefits of this vaccine outweigh the risks that come with it.
Profiteers are people/companies who are able to make ethically questionable
amounts of profit from goods that are necessary especially in times of emergency. During the coronavirus pandemic, numerous profiteers have taken advantage of the disease. These profiteers can be individual criminals who exploit the situation in order to make easy money or entire companies such as Amazon (among many other types of profiteers). In March 2020, third-party sellers on Amazon raised up the prices of hand sanitizer. Both the sellers and Amazon benefited from this considerably.
QAnon: a conspiracy group (also known as Q), is a disproven and discredited American far-right conspiracy theory group. Since 2018, anti-vaccine communities have cross-pollinated with QAnon and other paranoid fantasies. Participants in anti-vaccine groups online frequently see posts claiming that the government is using COVID-19 vaccines to secretly implant microchip identifiers in people, or that ingredients in vaccines will turn people into 5G antennas.
Russian bots. Carnegie Mellon University (2020) found that nearly half of the Twitter accounts spreading messages on the social media platform about the coronavirus pandemic are likely to be bots. They identified more than 100 false narratives about COVID-19 that are proliferating on Twitter by accounts controlled by bots. Examples of misinformation disseminated by bot accounts include tweeted conspiracy theories about hospitals being filled with mannequins and tweets that connected the spread of the coronavirus to 5G wireless towers!
Stop the steal. CNN (5/2/21) found leaders of the anti-vaccine movement and the 'Stop the Steal' crusade (believers that the presidential election was stolen from Trump) converged in January 2021. Some prominent anti-vaxxers directly coordinated with organizers of the DC rallies in January and pushed their message at other MAGA demonstrations, and on pro-Trump podcasts and social media platforms. The anti-vaccine message found a particularly receptive audience among some fervent non-mask-wearing Trump supporters.
Centre for Countering Digital Hate has analyzed the strategies of anti-vaccine advocates. "Conspiracism that allows you to connect anything together if you want to, because it doesn't require fact."
The rally at the US Capitol in January advertised as "The MAGA Health Freedom Event of the Century," included notable vaccine conspiracy theorists such as Mikki Willis, the filmmaker behind "Plandemic," which falsely suggests Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was responsible for the creation of the coronavirus.
Tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Tiktok to
name some, argue for free expression when it comes to misinformation (especially political misinformation). These platforms only began to take significant action to minimize the impact of anti-vaccine pages in late 2019. A report by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found the social media accounts held by so-called anti-vaxxers have increased their following by at least 7·8 million people since 2019. (Lancet, Vol 2, Issue 10 Oct 2020) The CCDH report ‘Failure to Act’, describes how out of 912 posts containing misinformation about COVID-19, fewer than one in 20 were dealt with by social media companies.
Wuhan was the first place the coronavirus was detected
in December 2019. Coronavirus is believed to have spread originally from animals to humans. However, at the start of the media outbreak of the disease, there were videos spreading on the internet where people were supposedly eating bats in a food market in Wuhan. Although it has been researched that coronavirus might have been contained from bats, these video clips were not from China. They were videos of a travel blogger from 2016 taken on an island called Palau in the Pacific Ocean.
Xlear nasal spray is an antiviral nasal spray that has been effective in easing of
the coronavirus symptoms. It could possibly have the potential to kill the virus, but there has not been enough evidence on this matter to make evidence-based statements. There have been some claims that Xlear is able to prevent the virus, but this is not true.
Youtube has been a popular platform for coronavirus
misinformation. There have been videos where the vaccine has been claimed to be lethal and that it causes infertility (among other theories). Youtube claimed that they had to delete 30 000 videos within 5 months during the pandemic due to the inappropriate content. Perhaps the most famous video was a conspiracy theory clip called "Plandemic" where numerous "doctors" and other "official" individuals claim that the virus and the potential vaccines are used to create power for elites.
