Los Angeles — Bridging information gaps through setting up effective digital media monitoring platforms for journalists is crucial in minimizing if not eradicating the spread of mis- and disinformation on COVID-19 related issues, according to an industry expert in the field of misinformation.
National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) CEO Cameron Hickey told participants of a recently-held webinar entitled “Vaccines and Public Health: Misinformation Trends (Understanding and Identifying Problematic Content), jointly presented by NCoC and Ethnic Media Services (EMS) Myth Buster Project that while there are probably no means to stop the proliferation of mis- and disinformation on COVID-19, there could be ways to inoculate and educate people on how to become more discerning when it comes to identifying facts from myths and/or misleading ideas and information.
During the online seminar, Hickey also underscored the crucial role of journalists in this endeavor of helping empower the public and the communities by providing them with legitimate sources of information that they could use in making critical decisions not only on issues about COVID-19 but also in their daily lives.
“Each of us has a role to play in reducing the impact of problematic content. You as a journalist have a frontline responsibility in educating the public in your communities,” Hickey, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, said.
With his expertise in the analysis of misinformation and having been an advocate of democracy, Hickey has developed groundbreaking tools like Junkipedia, which is designed to centralize the collection of problematic content so that everyone with a stake in solving this problem can benefit from a shared understanding of what threats exist and how to respond to them.
Specifically, Junkipedia gives not only journalists but also researchers and civil society organizations powerful tools to collect, track, analyze, and respond to mis- and disinformation spreading online.
“You can collect tips quickly and easily via tiplines, tag and classify each item submitted, and analyze narratives and identify trends in the data,” said Hickey, who also led the establishment of the people-powered misinformation monitoring program, the Civic Listening Corps. He has also served as the Director of the Algorithmic Transparency Institute, a current project of NCoC, for the past three years.Hickey recognized the urgency to put up these kind of legitimate platforms to safeguard people’s interests.
He said by now, we should be learning from the lessons from COVID-19’s experience and use these as future references to combat the spread of mis/ and disinformation or at least arm the public with safety nets that will allow them to scrutinize information presented to them in different social media.
“The appetite for this stuff does not go away and the people who have incentives to spread it [don’t] go away, whether incentives are political, or incentives are financial or those incentives are just to stir the pot and make people crazy which we see that as well. So when we think about efforts to curb this problem, we think less about the problems of proliferation of it and instead, we think about efforts to curb the impact of them and curbing the impact of them comes from inoculating folks, from educating folks, from having a positive interaction with them either through the journalism that we present, or the communication that we have or face-to-face reactions,” he said, when asked about how would he gauge the current efforts to curb mis- and disinformation on matters related to COVID-19.
EMS associate editor Pilar Marrero, for her part, said, “Disinformation narratives are spreading across digital media platforms including in-language platforms, monitoring these platforms to identify examples of dangerous dis- and misinformation in a timely and effective manner is critical for us as media reporters so we can challenge them and counter them with facts.” Headquartered in San Francisco, California, EMS works to enhance the capacity of ethnic news outlets to inform and engage diverse audiences on broader public issues with the goal of building more inclusive participatory democracy.
During the talks, Hickey has likewise put emphasis on the importance of context setting. “We all understand that viral misinformation is contagious and dangerous. It is, in some cases, as problematic than the actual viruses that are spreading. It can instigate people to make very poor decisions and put their health at risk,” he pointed out.
“We think about missing disinformation in ways that are very similar to the ways that we think about the spread of viruses,” he added.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2022, the World Health Organization declared an “infodemic” with regard to the mis- and disinformation spreading about the origin of the virus.
“It’s important to recognize that the problematic messages that we see and hear online have many different forms. Sometimes, we will call them misinformation, sometimes we will call them disinformation, sometimes we’ll call them rumors, conspiracies, even hate speech is problematic content, and my personal favorite, junk news, stuff that’s not totally false but still not healthy for you, just like junk food,” he added.
“We frequently see conspiracy theories. Usually, conspiracy theories reference an important boogeyman with an ulterior motive. When shared without the proper context it can be incredibly misleading. This comes in a wide range of forms,” he added.
He likewise emphasized the need to effectively verify numbers that are accurate and up-to-date. “When a statistic is shared on the Internet, but we don’t know, for example, what part of the whole that statistic represents, then that might be a much scarier statistic than the reality.”
According to Hickey, it is also important to be wary of pseudoscience. “In terms of public health, pseudoscience things like unproven cures for COVID-19, things that draw together, things that aren’t based on sound research, or medical science, or coming from trusted authoritative sources, spread quite a lot on the internet, and are off. As soon as you see things that have the hallmarks of that, it’s another clue to be skeptical,” he noted.
Another thing that warrants a closer look, he said, is “faulty logic.”
“They’re frequently arguments that while they can’t be proven to be false, aren’t necessarily exactly true either. They often come in the form of what we call logical fallacies. A good example of that is a false equivalence argument when you are comparing things and making the implication that ‘if this is true, then that should also be true, because they’re similar.’ But when they aren’t similar, when you’re comparing apples to oranges, then the underlying argument is no longer valid,” he said.
He said being able to establish the timeliness of the data presented is also critical.“This is particularly important in the ever-changing world of Public Health Information. Content that is old, might have been true the day it was published, or the day it was originally shared, but when it gets re-shared today, it may no longer be the case,” he said.
“We see this across the spectrum. It can often happen when a multi-year-old news article or piece of research is shared, but it can also be the case when it’s an image. It does not have to be false to be a problem,” he noted.
But he was also quick to point out that whatever the form (misinformation, rumors, conspiracies, disinformation, junk news and hate), it all misleads.
“Overall, the point is, it does not have to be false to be a problem, it is important to keep that in mind, how to respond, how to craft high-quality journalism in response to the kind of problematic ideas that we see,” he said.
He also discussed several key health themes, such as sudden death, excess deaths, vaccine detox, gas stove risks, and the bird flu, among other issues where the spreading of false information has occurred.
He said, “People are taking this fact, connecting it to the things they believe, or fear, and then amplifying it across social media. There are these BBC News posts, an accurate news article from a legitimate news source, but when it gets shared with this additional context, vaccine, or something else, or it’s only a coincidence, suddenly people are questioning the underlying news story, and they are using a legitimate trustworthy news source as essentially the evidence.”
“It’s critical to think about what headlines are used, what kind of information one tries to communicate, recognizing that things like this, risk people taking that reporting out of context and using it to fear-monger and amplify,” Hickey lamented.
“It’s important to note that this theme links to something that we see often in our disinformation research which is that folks often use sensational, concerning, or exciting things to amplify problematic or misleading messages in service of making money,” he said.
On H5n1, commonly known as the bird flu, Hickey said “there hasn’t been much mis- or disinformation spreading on this yet but there has been some new potential risk amplified by legitimate news coverage in the form of opinion from a trusted source, The New York Times, from a trusted expert Zainabeki, who has the headline – ‘An Even Deadlier Pandemic Could Be Here Soon.”
“There’s good news. We do have a vaccine for h5n1. It is not as easy to produce and there’s not as much of it as there has been for other diseases, including the flu, COVID-19. But it is a considerably harder disease to infect humans. We rarely see human to human transmission,” he said
Learning from COVID-19 experience, Hickey said, “It (bird flu) doesn’t mean it’s not something that we should be concerned about, but it is at a lower level of risk today.This is a not to say we should not be concerned about it, but we should be cautious about how we report about it, and we should be careful to share facts and pay close attention to it as the situation changes this.”
“As we saw with COVID-19, the facts on the ground can shift quickly and it’s important to be responsible and thoughtful and up to date,” Hickey said. (By Donnabelle Gatdula Arevalo/AJPress)
