The Infodemic by Joel Simon

Author:Joel Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports

On February 15, 2020, before an audience of foreign policy experts at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic. We are fighting an infodemic.” Referring to the rumors, lies, and conspiracy theories, circulating online and through the media, Tedros lamented that these spread “faster and more easily than this virus.”

Two months later, on April 14, at a time when there were 2 million cases of COVID-19 around the world and 120,000 people had already died, UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced the creation of a special communications project to fight the scourge of misinformation. “Around the world, people are scared,” Guterres declared in a video posted to social media channels. “Harmful health advice and snake-oil solutions are proliferating. Falsehoods are filling the airwaves. Wild conspiracy theories are infecting the internet. Hatred is going viral, stigmatizing and vilifying people and groups.”

The solution, Guterres asserted, was to flood the internet with “facts and science” that would build trust—trust in science and trust in institutions. “With common cause for common sense and facts, we can defeat COVID-19—and build a healthier, more equitable, just, and resilient world,” Guterres concluded.

The international community, Guterres affirmed, needed to find a way to break through. Until effective treatments were developed and a vaccine rolled out, information was just about the only weapon governments had to fight the disease. Accurate, reliable, and timely information could help change personal behavior, and convince people that they needed to abide by lockdowns, maintain social distance, wash their hands, and wear masks. But Guterres’s confidence that governments would get behind such an effort was severely misplaced. In fact, from the outset, as we have seen in earlier chapters, far from fighting the infodemic, governments around the world were fueling it. They did this in two ways. First, they used propaganda networks and social media to pump out misinformation that advanced their own position or weakened an adversary’s. China’s unfounded claim that COVID-19 originated in frozen food imported into the country is one example. Governments consistently censored data about the number of COVID cases to support their contention that the threat was exaggerated. They also made wild claims about miracle cures, including hydroxychloroquine, as a way of suggesting the pandemic would soon end and therefore tough decisions on mitigation measures were unnecessary.

The additional challenge, as the experience of Charles Loftus showed, is that people make decisions based not just on the information they consume, but on the context and meaning they give to it. Group identity may be more important than an objective analysis of the facts, and this is particularly true during periods of conflict and polarization. In the United States, Trump supporters who got their information directly from the president’s social media or filtered through Fox News tended to believe the president not because they were irrational or unsophisticated but because their political identity shaped their perceptions of reality.

This is why during the first COVID year Americans lived in several different

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