welcome to the infodemic
we've been here for years
A few weeks ago, the World Health Organization’s Director General told an audience that in the COVID-19 crisis, we are not just fighting a pandemic, but an “infodemic.” The worldwide spread of the novel coronavirus is the fertile information environment of disinformers’ wet dreams. Every molecule of hopefully-not-infected air we breathe is saturated with fear and distrust, and there are plenty of entities — individuals looking to make a quick buck, adversarial nation states hoping to keep us domestically distracted, and politicians both foreign and domestic — capitalizing on the crisis for their personal gain.
For disinformers of all stripes, the return on investment for creating and spreading malign narratives during this period is huge. The entire world — bored, sitting at home, mindlessly scrolling through their social networks and TV channels (or watching the 2011 pandemic film Contagion) — is uniquely receptive to any and all information about the virus, how to protect their families, and what life might look like in a few months. There is nearly endless bandwidth for exploitation. Since the beginning of the crisis, we’ve seen:
A fake Ukrainian Ministry of Health email about Ukrainian evacuees from Wuhan cause violent protests in a small village;
Fake text and encrypted messages about the imminent imposition of martial law;
A fringe politician in Massachusetts (who I interviewed in 2018 after I discovered he was using an astroturfing operation to smear Elizabeth Warren and boost his political prospects) falsely claiming you can kill coronavirus with a blow dryer;
The US and EU both accusing Russia of using the crisis to amplify panic and distrust in Western institutions
…among hundreds of others of examples.
I am not surprised by any of this, but I am a bit exhausted by the breathless stories covering the mountains of mis- and disinformation and “what it all means.” What it means is that our information environment is poisoned, and particularly when it comes to a public health crisis, no political party or country or religion has the antidote to that poison. Slowly the world is realizing that disinformation is not only a democratic problem; it is a human one.
We didn’t enter an infodemic when COVID-19 hit. We’ve been in one for a while now. And the responses we’re seeing are inadequate.
One of the best antidotes to disinformation is transparency: a clear, cogent, coordinated government messaging campaign, particularly when that government enjoys the trust of society. The US government has so far been unable to provide meet that mark, and in many cases actively worked against it. Last week, when the Trump administration finally decided to take action to curb the flow of people between continents, I was in London, and the situation was evolving rapidly. Suddenly Trump wasn’t admitting anyone to the US who had travelled from Europe, except for the UK and Ireland. Thousands rushed home, paying as much as $20,000 in change fees to get in before the deadline. No one could explain why the UK and Ireland were left off the list, and later that week, they were added. But did the extra checks on passengers from London begin at 12:01 AM on Monday, or 11:59 PM? It was damn near impossible to find out. When I walked through the passport control, I was asked where I had been in the last two weeks and told “welcome home” without so much as filling out a form or having my temperature taken. It seemed no one else was being subject to extra checks, either, despite the likelihood than many on my flight from London had recently been in Europe. The government began to urge social distancing at a press conference at which President Trump did not practice it himself. The closure of the northern border with Canada was announced via tweet, with no integral details.
Every day, Americans are left scratching their heads. These are the holes that disinformation is crafted to fill. They should not exist in the first place.
Social media companies, for their part, have reacted much more strongly to the pandemic than any other information emergency in recent memory. They’ve released a joint statement about their cooperation, have been working to surface authoritative content from sources like the WHO and CDC on the tops of users’ feeds, have banned misleading ads about the virus, and have given free advertising to trusted sources.
I am glad that they’re taking the infodemic seriously, but once again, they only seem to spring to action and join forces when people die, and then usually only when white people die. The Christchurch attacks spurred cooperation, social-media-generated violence in Burma, and India only spurred an “oops” after the fact. Why is there no recognition that the information we see and engage with on a daily basis outside of crisis periods is just as important as what we read during it? Indeed, that information affects our collective response to crises like coronavirus, and determines who will be leading us during those periods. When malign information sources are allowed to fester unchecked for months, building audience trust and engagement, only to be removed during an extraordinary event, the impact they have on users before that material is removed can be severe.
I know, I know. The effects of content policing are not what you’re worried about right now. But unless social media and tech companies should apply their pandemic standards to the worldwide infodemic they have perpetuated over the past decade and governments provide the rules and oversight necessary to make them do it, our 21st century infodemic will become the new normal, like the flu. Unfortunately, it won’t be seasonal.