Disinformation spreads
even faster than disease—and it can be just as deadly.
Kat
Eschner February 11, 2020
A Harvard-affiliated epidemiologist. The
president. Untold (and mostly anonymous) people online. The
outbreak of 2019 novel coronavirus has been clouded by false
information from these sources and more, ranging from stretched half-truths to
downright fakes. In a still-evolving public health situation like this one,
such misinformation stokes panic and makes it harder to quell the spread of
disease. But the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is ill-prepared to
combat digital disinfo.
“We really count on all of
you to try to set the record straight,” CDC spokesperson Nancy Messonier,
director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told
reporters when asked about false information during a briefing last week. “We
recognize that misinformation can rapidly spread, especially through social
media, and I’m asking for your help to combat the spread of those rumors.”
Although the government
body has a lengthy FAQ on its website about what is currently
known about 2019-CoV, it does not specifically address false information, which
is often called mis- or disinformation. The CDC did not respond to Popular
Science’s request for further comment on the matter.
According to Nicholas
Evans, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who
studies false information and biosecurity, the CDC’s approach is to first
release “very clear guidance on what they consider to be the best
evidence-based policy for responding to the disease.”
That’s probably not going
to help combat false information about a disease, he says—as
demonstrated by the success of the anti-vaxx movement, simply presenting scientifically
correct information isn’t enough to dispel an active disinformation campaign.
The other thing the CDC is
currently doing, Evans says, is working to address specific false news stories
when asked about them by journalists and public health authorities. Evans says
that isn’t enough, either.
“I think that everyone is
in a really heightened state at the moment, and the CDC or an authority like
that could play a role in countering disinformation,” he says. At the very
least, he adds, they should probably put up a webpage that identifies and
debunks some of the most common myths about 2019-nCoV.
But even that wouldn’t
necessarily solve the problem. “The resources that someone like the CDC would
need to stage an active campaign of countering disinformation, unfortunately,
are much much larger than the resources you need to spread that
disinformation,” Evans says. “Bullshit
tends to move faster than the truth and require fewer resources.”
Bad info also gets results
for people seeking greater prominence, money, or even just chaos. “For a lot of
people, the incentives come in part from attention,” says Evans. Take Eric
Ding, a Harvard-affiliated nutritional epidemiologist whose inaccurate tweets have stoked panic about the virus
for well over a week now. He started by tweeting about a
now-revised preprint paper, meaning it had not been peer reviewed, that
seemed to show that 2019-nCoV was highly infectious. A now-deleted tweet
described it as “thermonuclear pandemic level bad” and Ding predicted “possibly
an unchecked pandemic.” He gained tens of thousands of followers and was
interviewed by numerous media outlets—despite the fact that his epidemiological
expertise has nothing to do with infectious diseases. “His follower count went
through the roof,” says Kent State University infectious disease epidemiologist
Tara Smith, one of many scientists who have continued to call Ding out on
Twitter. “I think it’s made things a lot more confusing for a lot of people.”
Because science is a
specialized discipline, people who want to spread false information can twist
its findings to their advantage, says Aditya Ranganathan, a public education
specialist at UC Berkeley and member of the leadership committee at Public Editor. For example,
look at the false claims being made by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones
that 2019-nCoV was made in a lab. They rely on a flawed analysis that has been retracted by its
authors. The scientific discipline has lots of tools, like peer review, to make
sure that false information is corrected--but those corrections don’t always
make it to the public. That’s why he believes it’s important for the public to
learn to think critically and evaluate information the same way scientists are
taught to. (Check out our guide to fact-checking
dubious science headlines here.)
Jones’s media outlet
InfoWars makes millions of dollars selling supplements and supplies
for “preppers,” people preparing for the apocalypse. Outbreaks
represent a big opportunity to stoke
existential fears. And because most laypeople don’t know much about how
scientific studies are evaluated and published, it’s easy for someone with
a large audience to cherry-pick unvetted, incomplete, or entirely unfounded
research and present it as “evidence” to the masses.
“Health is really where
science hits the everyday person on a daily basis,” Ranganathan says, making
outbreaks a particularly dangerous scenario. But governments have a long way to
go before they’re prepared to combat false information online about health, he
says.
The World Health
Organization includes planning to combat misinformation in the
checklist it creates for governments coming up with their own pandemic response
plan. But at this point, the CDC’s public-facing efforts at combating false
information are minimal.
Both the current situation
and past outbreaks make it clear that’s a problem. False information about Ebola helped the disease spread across
the Democratic Republic of the Congo—and may even have changed the course
of the DRC’s election. In the current context, fears about the coronavirus
have fueled racism and shaped government policy—including
the U.S. travel ban, which runs contrary
to what the World Health Organization recommends. We don’t know yet what
will happen with 2019-nCoV, but the spread of all this misinformation isn’t
helping. When the next pandemic comes, whether that’s today or in a decade,
false information is likely to spread even faster than the disease.
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