As COVID-19 spreads, so does misinformation

Almost three years into the pandemic, COVID-19 continues persistent stubbornly.

So does the disinformation About the virus.

As COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths soar in some parts of the country, myths and misleading narratives continue to evolve and spread, infuriating overworked doctors and eluding content moderators.

What began in 2020 as rumors questioning the existence or severity of COVID quickly evolved into often outlandish claims about dangerous technology lurking in masks and supposed miracle cures from unproven drugs like ivermectin.

The vaccine rollout last year fueled another wave of unfounded alarms.

Now, in addition to all the claims that are still being considered, there are conspiracy theories about the Long term effects of treatments, say the researchers.

Ideas continue to thrive on social media platforms, and the year-long bombardment has made it increasingly difficult for accurate advice to spread, say disinformation researchers.

This makes people who already suffer pandemic fatigue become even more accustomed to the ongoing dangers of COVID and are susceptible to other harmful medical content.

“It’s easy to forget that health misinformation, even about COVID, can continue to keep people from getting vaccinated or create stigma,” says Megan Marrelli, editorial director of Meedan, a nonprofit focused on digital literacy and access to information.

“We know for a fact that misinformation about health contributes to the spread of disease in the real world.”

Chirping researchers are particularly concerned.

The company recently dismantled the teams responsible for keeping tabs on dangerous or inaccurate material on the platform, stopped enforcing its COVID misinformation policy, and began basing some content moderation decisions on public surveys posted by its new owner and CEO, The Billionaire Elon Musk.

Between November 1 and December 5, Australian researchers collected more than half a million conspiratorial and misleading COVID tweets in English, using terms such as “deep state”, “hoax” and “hoax” and “bioweapon” biological). .

The tweets garnered over 1.6 million likes and 580,000 retweets.

According to researchers, the volume of toxic material skyrocketed late last month with the release of a film that included unsubstantiated claims that COVID vaccines have triggered “the greatest mortality orchestrated history of the world”.

Naomi Smith, a sociologist at Federation University Australia who helped lead the research with Timothy Graham, a digital media expert at Queensland University of Technology, said Twitter’s disinformation policies helped curb anti-vaccination content that was common states in the platform in 2015 and 2016.

Between January 2020 and September 2022, Twitter suspended more than 11,000 accounts for violating their COVID misinformation policy.

Now, Smith said, protective barriers are “falling down in real time, which is both academically interesting and absolutely terrifying.”

“Before COVID, people who believed in medical misinformation used to talk to each other, locked in their own small bubbleand you had to work a bit to find it,” he explains.

“But now, you don’t have to do any work to find that information—it appears in your feed with every other kind of information.”

Several prominent Twitter accounts that were suspended for making unsubstantiated claims about COVID have been reinstated in recent weeks, including those of the congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greenea Republican from Georgia, and Robert Malone, a vaccine skeptic.

Musk himself took to Twitter to assess the pandemic, predicting in March 2020 that the US was likely to have “nearly zero new cases” by the end of April.

(In the last week of the month, more than 100,000 positives were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

This month has targeted the Doctor Antonio Fauciwho will soon step down as chief medical adviser to the president Joe Biden and director for many years of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Musk said Fauci should be prosecuted.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

Other big social platforms, including TikTok and YouTube, said last week they were staying busy fight against COVID misinformation.

Youtube prohibits content – including videos, comments and links – about vaccines and COVID-19 that contradicts the recommendations of local health authorities or the World Health Organization.

the policy of Facebook on COVID content is over 4,500 words. Tick ​​tock he said he had removed more than 250,000 videos for COVID disinformation and has worked with partners such as their Content Advisory Board to develop their enforcement policies and strategies.

(Musk disbanded Twitter’s advisory board this month.)

But the platforms have had a hard time enforcing their COVID standards.

Journalist, An organization that tracks misinformation on the Internet, discovered this fall that typing “covid vaccine” on TikTok suggested searching for “covid vaccine injury” and “covid vaccine alert‘, while the same Google query resulted in recommendations for ‘covid walk-in vaccine’ and ‘covid vaccine types’.

According to the researchers, a TikTok search for “mRNA vaccine” has returned. 5 videos with false claims in the first 10 results.

TikTok said in a statement that its community guidelines “clarify that we do not allow harmful disinformation, including medical disinformation, and we will remove it from the platform.”

In the past, people would ask their neighbors for medical advice or try to diagnose themselves via Google searches, explains Dr. Anish Agarwal, an emergency room physician in Philadelphia.

crazy claims

Now, after years of a pandemic, he continues to get patients who believe “crazy” social media claims that COVID vaccines will fit robots into their arms.

“We deal every day,” says Agarwal, a professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and deputy director of Penn Medicine’s Center for Digital Health.

The online and offline debates about the coronavirus are constantly changing, with patients asking him questions about booster shots and the long run of COVID lately, Agarwal said.

Agarwal has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the social media habits of different populations in relation to COVID.

“In the future, understanding our behaviors and thoughts about COVID will also likely shed light on how people interact with other types of health information on social media, how can we actually use social media to fight misinformation,” he said.

Years of lies and rumors about COVID have had a contagious effect, hurting public acceptance of all vaccines, said Heidi J. Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“COVID Rumors Won’t Go Away:

they will be reused and adapted,” he said. “We can’t cancel that. No company can solve this problem.”

Some efforts to curb the spread of misinformation about the virus have come into conflict with First Amendment issues.

A law that California passed several months ago, and which goes into effect next month, would punish doctors for spreading false information about COVID vaccines.

It is already facing legal resources from plaintiffs who describe the regulation as an unconstitutional violation of the freedom of expression.

tech companies like Meta, Google and Twitter this year they faced lawsuits from people banned for misinformation about COVID and for alleging that companies went overboard in their content moderation efforts, while other lawsuits accused the platforms of not doing enough to curb misleading narratives about the pandemic.

Dr. Graham Walker, an emergency room doctor in San Francisco, said online rumors about the pandemic have led him and many of his colleagues to use social media to try to correct the inaccuracies.

He has posted several Twitter threads with more than a hundred tweets full of evidence trying to deny the misinformation about the coronavirus.

But this year, he said he feels increasingly defeated by the deluge of toxic content on various medical topics.

He left Twitter after the company dropped its COVID misinformation policy.

“I started to think it wasn’t a battle won,” she said. “It doesn’t look like a fair fight.”

Now, according to Walker, he’s seeing a “triple epidemic” of COVID-19, RSV and flu bombard the healthcare system, dropping emergency wait times at some hospitals from less than an hour to six hours.

Misinformation about easily accessible treatments is, at least in part, responsible for this.

“If we had a further increase in vaccination with the newer vaccines, we would probably have a fewer people getting seriously ill with COVIDand that will undoubtedly make a dent in the hospitalization figures,” he said.

“Honestly, at this point, we’re going to take any dent we can get.”

c.2022 The New York Times Society