For the first time in over a decade, the world is suffering from a pandemic. While it is bad enough that entities across the globe have to scrounge for resources to protect their citizens against the coronavirus — in addition to dealing with over 1 million deaths, and counting — another detrimental factor is at play: misinformation.
“We’re not just battling the virus,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), said. “We’re also battling the trolls and conspiracy theorists that push misinformation and undermine the outbreak response.”
The “infodemic,” as the WHO coined it, is the rapid spread of misleading or fabricated news, images and videos related to the pandemic.
While the obvious solution may be for individuals to just ignore this information, it is important to remember that given the global crisis, the stakes are high and people are desperate. For instance, rumors about food scarcity prompted people to stockpile supplies early on in the pandemic, which caused actual supply shortages. Hundreds of people have died as a result of taking what they thought were remedies for COVID-19, including chloroquine and methanol alcohol, because of misinformation saying that they were safe to take. Additionally, distrust perpetuated by misinformation about a possible vaccine could undermine vaccination campaigns once one becomes available.
“Infodemics have already happened in one way or another in past epidemics, but what’s happening right now is something of a global scale, where people are connected through different means and share information more quickly,” Tim Nguyen, a WHO infodemiologist, said. “This has created a new situation where we are rethinking and reshaping our approach to managing infodemics in emergencies.”
So, what — or who — is driving the COVID-19 infodemic? According to researchers at Cornell University, it is none other than President Donald Trump.
This is not surprising. Trumps’ rhetoric throughout the pandemic has consistently downplayed the severity of the virus. Just a week after Trump tested positive for the coronavirus, he was back on the campaign trail. At one of his rallies, he asked the crowd “who has had” the coronavirus. In response, many people shouted, and he said, “Yeah, a lot of people. A lot of people.” Trump is wearing the fact that he had the coronavirus like a badge of honor. This is a slap in the face to the thousands of Americans who cannot afford the high quality of healthcare that Trump has access to. Even more, his tone is insulting to the over 200,000 Americans who have died from the virus.
The researchers analyzed 38 million articles about the pandemic in English-language media around the world. Over 1.1 million individual articles mentioned COVID-19 misinformation, and Trump was mentioned in 38% of these articles, according to the research.
Some key takeaways from the article:
"It is commonly assumed that misinformation is largely a phenomenon of social media, provoking calls for stricter regulation of the content on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. However, misinformation also appears in traditional media" (2).
"Only 16.4% of the misinformation conversation was 'factchecking' in nature, suggesting that the majority of COVID misinformation is conveyed by the media without question or correction" (1).
"Genuine experts and the representatives of scientific institutions should … be given greater prominence in media coverage in order to avoid the inadvertent spreading of misinformation. Alternatively, misinformation presented by public figures should be corrected by media within the same report, rather than after the fact" (12).
An important distinction to make, however, is that Trump is not the creator of misinformation. As former President Barack Obama said on the Oct. 14 Pod Save America podcast, “That is a problem that is going to outlast trump. Trump is a symptom of it, and an accelerant to it. But he did not create it.”
So what can we do in this seemingly hopeless time? Increasing media literacy is the only solution. There is no way to stop misinformation, but people can educate themselves to think critically about the media they are consuming, including both social and traditional media. It is promising that social media sites like Facebook have banned ads that discourage vaccinations, but this is only one critical aspect to the solution.
The fight against the infodemic is multi-faceted: journalists, social media developers and consumers all have a role. An important first step in the right direction is asking ourselves what Obama asked in the podcast: “How do we re-establish some baselines of truth that at least the vast majority of people can agree to?”
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