COVID-19:
          ’Infodemic‘ of
  Pseudoscience and
CONSPIRACY
                        THEORIES

SCIENTIFIC DENIAL. For me as a scholar is to watch what happened with COVID denial. In real-time, I watched a denialist campaign be born.
–Lee McIntyre

It's going to disappear. One day, it's like a miracle It will disappear. There's no reason to panic.
– Donald John Trump

People are dying from this. People die when the leader of a country is a science denier. That's what happens.
–Lee McIntyre

Source:[4]

The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has been accompanied by a large amount of misleading and false information about the virus, especially on social media. The spread of misleading information about the virus has led the World Health Organization (WHO) to warn of an on-going INFODEMIC or an overabundance of information—especially misinformation—during an epidemic.

Misinformation about COVID-19 has proliferated widely on social media, ranging from the peddling of fake cures, such as gargling with lemon or salt water and injecting yourself with bleach, to false conspiracy theories that the virus was bioengineered in a lab in Wuhan, or that the 5G cellular network is causing or exacerbating symptoms of COVID-19.

The conspiracy film Plandemic appeared online on May 4th of 2020, garnering millions of views and quickly becoming one of the most widespread examples of coronavirus-related misinformation. The video promotes dangerous health advice, for example, falsely suggesting that wearing a mask actually “activates” the coronavirus. Fake news about the virus has also been actively promoted by political elites, such as President Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who falsely claimed that hydroxychloroquine is “working in all places” as a treatment against the virus.

But misinformation about COVID-19 is not limited to information that is blatantly true or false, which widens the scope of the problem. For example, although the harms and benefits of hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment are indeed being studied, there is currently no scientific consensus on its effectiveness. Thus, even deciding what counts as misinformation about COVID-19 is a complicated matter, as insights into the causes of and treatments for the virus develop over time.
Nonetheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that misinformation about COVID-19 is a common problem. For example, a poll by ©Ofcom in the United Kingdom found that almost half (46%) of the United Kingdom population reported exposure to fake news about the coronavirus. Similar results (48%) have been reported by ©Pew in the United States.

In particular, amongst those exposed, nearly two-thirds (66%) reported seeing it on a daily basis, which is problematic as repeated exposure is known to increase belief in fake news.

Although mass endorsement of conspiracy theories about the virus is not yet widespread, substantial minorities (typically about a third of the sample) in the United Kingdom and the United States report to believe that the virus is either manmade or produced on purpose by powerful organizations. Indeed, a ©YouGov survey found that about 28% of Americans and 50% of Fox News viewers think that Bill Gates is planning to use the COVID-19 vaccine to implement microchips in people. Moreover, a recent analysis of the most viewed coronavirus YouTube videos found that over 25% of the top videos about the virus contained misleading information, reaching over 62 million views worldwide.

Another emerging insight is that COVID-19 conspiracies and rampant misinformation can adversely impact the effectiveness of containment strategies. Indeed, misinformation about COVID-19 can fundamentally distort people’s risk perception of the virus. This is important as risk perception has been linked to the adoption of COVID-19 preventative health behaviors. A recent study by Uscinski et al. (2020) found that belief in conspiracies about the virus is associated with a propensity to reject information from expert authorities. Similar findings were reported by Freeman et al. (2020), who also noted a link between belief in COVID-19 conspiracies and an increase in vaccine hesitancy.

A review by Politico found that Facebook’s fact-checking efforts did little to prevent coronavirus conspiracies from being shared widely in private groups on the platform. Further complications arise from the CONTINUED INFLUENCE EFFECT of misinformation, which states that people may continue to believe misinformation even after it has been debunked. In addition, while media literacy initiatives are important and can be effective under the right conditions, they are often expensive to develop, slow to roll out, and reactive rather than proactive.

Source:[20]

Humans are generally very bad at detecting fake information. This is because fake news often looks like real news – and we think we recognise a pattern.

The way to think about it's 2.7 billion Truman Shows.

                      Each person has their own reality,
                      with their own facts.

Over time, you have the false sense that everyone agrees with you because everyone in your news feed sounds just like you. And that once you're in that state, it turns out you're easily manipulated.
                              – Roger Mcnamee

We all simply are operating on a different set of facts.

When that happens at scale, you're no longer able to reckon with or even consume information that contradicts with the worldview that you've created. That means we aren't actually being objective, constructive individuals.
                       – Rachida Richardson

                          Source:[6]

Fake news also has an advantage when it comes to sharing information. When sharing information online, we give things very little scrutiny.

We are also more inclined to share BAD NEWS, and a lot of the news related to COVID-19 is bad. One of the things we know from classic anthropological work is that misinformation thrives where people have little control over environmental threats – like volcanic eruptions, unpredictable weather patterns or disease. Modern psychological research concurs: under uncertainty, people seek safety, security and order – to compensate for lack of control. In the past, this kind of compensation might have been magical beliefs. But today, it is more likely to be fake news. COVID-19 is unknown, uncertain and uncontrolled. There’s a clear threat to basic needs such as food, shelter, safety – and most importantly, staying alive.

As a result, information that is false, but seems to restore these basic needs, tends to spread quickly.

Source:[21]

Algorithms and manipulative politicians are becoming so expert at learning how to trigger us…

getting so good at creating fake news that we absorb as if it were reality, and confusing us into believing those lies. It's as though we have less and less control over who we are and what we believe.

So many of the problems that we're discussing, like around political polarization exist in spades on cable television. The media has this exact same problem, where their business model, by and large, is that they're selling our attention to advertisers.

The Internet is just a new, even more efficient way to do that.

                         – Justin Rosenstein

                                                                  Source:[6]