Nearly three years into the pandemic, COVID-19 remains
stubbornly persistent. So, too, does misinformation about the virus.
As COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths rise some places
globally, myths and misleading narratives continue to evolve and spread, exasperating
overburdened doctors and evading content moderators.
اضافة اعلان
What began in 2020 as rumors that cast doubt on the existence or
seriousness of
COVID quickly evolved into often outlandish claims about
dangerous technology lurking in masks and the supposed miracle cures from
unproven drugs, like ivermectin. Last year’s vaccine rollout fueled another
wave of unfounded alarm. Now, in addition to all the claims still being bandied
about, there are conspiracy theories about the long-term effects of the
treatments, researchers say.
“It’s easy to forget that health misinformation, including about COVID, can still contribute to people not getting vaccinated or creating stigmas”
The ideas still thrive on social media platforms, and the
constant barrage, now a years long accumulation, has made it increasingly
difficult for accurate advice to break through, misinformation researchers say.
That leaves people already suffering from pandemic fatigue to become further
inured to
COVID’s continuing dangers and susceptible to other harmful medical
content.
“It’s easy to forget that health misinformation, including about
COVID, can still contribute to people not getting vaccinated or creating
stigmas,” said Megan Marrelli, editorial director of Meedan, a nonprofit
focused on digital literacy and information access. “We know for a fact that
health misinformation contributes to the spread of real-world disease.”
Twitter is of particular concern for researchers. The company
recently gutted the teams responsible for keeping dangerous or inaccurate
material in check on the platform, stopped enforcing its
COVID misinformation policy and began basing some content moderation decisions on public polls
posted by its new owner and chief executive, billionaire Elon Musk.
From November 1 to December 5, 2022, Australian researchers
collected more than half a million conspiratorial and misleading
English-language tweets about COVID, using terms such as “deep state”, “hoax”,
and “bioweapon”. The tweets drew more than 1.6 million likes and 580,000
retweets.
The researchers said the volume of toxic material surged in late
November with the release of a film that included baseless claims that COVID vaccines
set off “the greatest orchestrated die-off in the history of the world.”
Naomi Smith, a sociologist at
Federation University Australia who helped conduct the research with Timothy Graham, a digital media expert at
Queensland University of Technology, said Twitter’s misinformation policies
helped tamp down anti-vaccination content that had been common on the platform
in 2015 and 2016. From January 2020 to September 2022, Twitter suspended more
than 11,000 accounts over
violations of its COVID misinformation policy.
Now, Smith said, the protective barriers are “falling over in
real time, which is both interesting as an academic and absolutely terrifying.”
NewsGuard, an organization that tracks online misinformation, found this fall that typing “COVID vaccine” into TikTok caused it to suggest searches for “COVID vaccine injury”
“Pre-COVID, people who believed in medical misinformation were
generally just talking to each other, contained within their own little bubble,
and you had to go and do a bit of work to find that bubble,” she said. “But
now, you don’t have to do any work to find that information — it is presented
in your feed with any other types of information.”
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. Other major
social platforms, including TikTok and YouTube, said in recent weeks that they
remained committed to combating COVID misinformation.
YouTube prohibits content — including videos, comments, and
links — about vaccines and COVID-19 that contradicts recommendations from the
local health authorities or the World Health Organization. Facebook’s policy on
COVID content is more than 4,500 words long. TikTok said it had removed more
than 250,000 videos for COVID misinformation and worked with partners such as
its content advisory council to develop its policies and enforcement
strategies. (Musk disbanded Twitter’s advisory council last month.)
But the platforms have struggled to enforce their COVID rules.
NewsGuard, an organization that tracks online misinformation,
found this fall that typing “COVID vaccine” into TikTok caused it to suggest
searches for “COVID vaccine injury” and “COVID vaccine warning,” while the same
query on Google led to recommendations for “walk-in COVID vaccine” and “types
of COVID vaccines.” One search on TikTok for “mRNA vaccine” brought up five
videos containing false claims within the first 10 results, according to
researchers. TikTok said in a statement that its community guidelines “make
clear that we do not allow harmful misinformation, including medical
misinformation, and we will remove it from the platform.”
Dr Graham Walker, an emergency physician in San Francisco, said
the rumors spreading online about the pandemic drove him and many of his
colleagues to social media to try to correct inaccuracies. He has posted
several Twitter threads with more than a hundred evidence-packed tweets trying
to debunk misinformation about the coronavirus.
But this year, he said he felt increasingly defeated by the
onslaught of toxic content about a variety of medical issues. He left Twitter
after the company abandoned its COVID misinformation policy.
“I began to think that this was not a winning battle,” he said.
“It doesn’t feel like a fair fight.”
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