Tuesday 16 March 2021 was a dark day, yet strangely familiar. A gunman has killed eight people in the metropolitan area of Atlanta, including six Asian women. In the same day, 1245 Americans died from COVID-19.
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Andrew Moshirnia
Senior Lecturer, Monash Business School
I wrote about the need for special intervention to combat misinformation on social media that is causing racial hatred in an era of random terrorism.
The backdrop of the global pandemic, and another mass murder causing terror, reinforces the need for aggressive fact-checking, content moderation, and a willingness to fact-check the fact-checkers. COVID-19 misinformation on social media is extremely dangerous, destabilizing forces are likely to exploit it, and the current firm guarantees against it are inadequate.
Without adequate and robust fact-checking, misinformation on social media about COVID-19 could go unchallenged and incite racial hatred – if not already.
Specific concerns are incorrect information about the origin of COVID-19 and posts that detract from the precautionary measures. Conspiracy theorists of origin maintain that COVID-19 is not zoonotic. Instead, they claim that the virus originated from 5G radio waves and / or that it was designed in a laboratory in Wuhan.
The latter fable has been reinforced by Republican politicians in the US, including Senator Tom Cotton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former President Donald Trump. Instead of the stab-in-the-back myth (the Dolchstoß legend that blames Germany’s WWI defeat on the Jews), it’s a sneeze-in-the-back myth, with similar xenophobic tone and associated threats to domestic minorities.
Reports of violence against Asians and individuals of Asian descent, especially women, are increasing unexpectedly worldwide, including in Australia.
Undermining preventive measures
Incorrect information can also undermine preventative measures and advocate for ineffective or deadly substitutes. False messages about oxygen velocity, mask use and hydroxychloroquine form an ‘infodemia’.
Anti-vaccine theories range from more concerns about pedestrians from permanent DNA reprogramming and the persistent slander of autism, to the more overt anti-Semitic argument that vaccines will enable Jewish businessmen to control global minds.
The anti-Semitic and anti-Chinese libel of laboratories quickly merged, as indicated by a false claim on March 15, 2020, that George Soros – a Hungarian American billionaire – owns the Wuhan laboratory where COVID-19 was allegedly developed.
From these examples, it appears that COVID-19 misinformation is extremely dangerous as it can encourage lethal behavior, whether in the form of non-compliance or violence.
It is also self-evident that destabilizing actors, foreign and domestic, use these lies, which contribute to a kind of biological warfare against the cheapest.
Reuters reported in March 2020 that Russia was using COVID-19 disinformation against the West. In May 2020, studies showed that about half of the Twitter accounts that COVID-19 discusses were likely to collide. Recently, the Wall Street Journal noted that websites linked to Russian intelligence services falsify information to compromise the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. This follows similarly documented patterns in Russian bot behavior in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election.
Too long to respond to incorrect information
Social media policies have taken far too long to respond to this climate of misinformation.
After Facebook allowed on its platform to increase groups and content against vaccines, Facebook recently announced a stricter stance on misinformation against vaccines. While Facebook’s fact-checking program was established in 2016, anti-vaccine ads were only targeted for reduction in 2019, and anti-vaccine groups were only singled out in February 2021 – a year in the current pandemic.
Before the end of 2020, Twitter’s permanent policies reached certain categories of COVID-19 misinformation. But it only targeted vaccine incorrect information by December 2020, with further expansion of the policy in March 2021.
My research has criticized the fact-checking of Facebook, as it is vulnerable to political interference, and it can cause clandestine deviations to avoid offending against powerful groups.
It is essential to check the fact checkers to ensure that they do not inadvertently subtract information or ignore incorrect information. Facebook does use a kind of self-regulating ‘high court’, but the problem lies in the fact that it is designed to address the former, while ignoring the latter.
Facebook’s oversight board has been praised as a step towards fairer and more transparent moderation of the content. This praise seems to miss the point when one appreciates the greatest danger of misinformation during a time of plague and arbitrary acts of terrorism.
To date, the supervisory board has no authority to order Facebook to remove content. Instead, it only considers the content that Facebook has already removed – the supervisory board can order the restoration of this controversial content, but can not protect the public by removing deadly lies.
The supervisory board therefore functions to endorse Facebook’s previous removals, or to punish Facebook by asking for incorrect information to grow incorrectly. Do better Facebook, otherwise we will force you to make more money!
Of the first five material decisions of the board, four ordered that the content be restored. One of these posts that arose was advocating for the unmasked (and potentially deadly) COVID-19 hydroxychloroquine, ‘drug’, described as a ‘harmless drug’.
Perhaps the supervisory board will grow into a more influential body in the fullness of time, but we do not have the luxury.
False news: the other deadly pandemic
Governments can speed up the process of our informative immune system by publicly and repeatedly noticing that social media is still failing to address this issue.
Politicians must continue to drag social media executives before committees, stressing the consequences of toxic misinformation and shaming the inadequate policies offered by billion-dollar entities.
In the battle between COVID-19 variants and current vaccination efforts, and against the backdrop of racially motivated violence, we must not delay the deception.