The COVID-19 pandemic has been equally defined by how much we don’t know ace, how much we do. That vacuum has been quickly filled with bullshit. The United Nations secretary-general, you are warned we’re living through a pandemic of misinformation,” and the head of the World Health Organization said it’s an “infodemic.” In the midst of battling a global health emergency, we may find ourselves fending off another scourge of the conspiracy theories and misinformation.
It’s certainly feels like, there’s a lot of fake news swirling around about the coronavirus, but how does it compare to another major misinformation clearing the 2016 election? Research on coronaviruses misinformation is largely limited to public opinion surveys and a preprint of research that has yet to be peer-reviewed. But when we compare the preliminary findings to the research on the 2016 election, they suggest that more people are seeing — and believing — misinformation now, and it may have something to do with the challenge of understanding the new disease.
Measuring exactly how much is bunk out there to begin with is a challenge, in part because so much misinformation is shared through social media, ” said Gordon Pennycook, a behavioral psychologist at Canada’s University of Regina, who studies the fake news. It is possible to measure, for instance, the number of tweets linking to the specific, such as news sitesbut no way to see every instance of that particular false claim is made on Facebook, especially when those claims can take many forms, including the environment, Pennycook said.
An easier measure is how many people recall having seen “faux news”. The The Pew Research Center’s survey conducted in the second week of March, found that 48 percent of Americans reported seeing at least “some” made-up news about the outbreak. Only 20 percent of respondents said they had seen no such news, the remaining 32 percent said they had seen “not much.” In the preprint paper from researchers at Cornell University, respondents were simply asked if they remember seeing certain claims about ” coronavirus, some of which were true and some of which were false. About 7 percent of the respondents accurately recalled seeing for the false claim.
But just because you’ve seen the fake news, doesn’t mean you believe it. I’ve seen plenty of bogus claims on my Facebook page, myself, and I haven’t started drinking the bleach yet. So far, the research indicates, the number of people who actually believe these ideas is dependent on the claim. In that Cornell university paper, and the percent of respondents who both recalled seeing faux news and believing it ranged from 14 percent to 19 percent. This represents a higher percentage of the population actually believing the fake news than we saw in the end of 2016. One study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, found that only 8 percent of Americans, both recalled seeing and believing a piece of fake news about the 2016 election.
So, on average, double the rate of people recalled and believed in the fake-news-in-the COVID of context compared to what we saw in the 2016 olympics,” said Douglas Kriner, a government professor at Cornell university, and one of the authors of the preprint.
Other studies have found a wider range in how people are willing to believe in something. The preprint from: Pennycook if the Act in early March whether they believed its claims about COVID-19, without indicating whether they were true or false. The percent of Americans, who, they said, believed the false claims ranged from less than 1 percent of the claim that eating garlic can, the cure, coronavirus, even though it cannot to just over 20 percent of the claim that the seasonal flu was just as dangerous to the COVID-19, even though it the flu is far less deadly). And a survey from the Pew Research Center’s conducted in mid-March, reported an almost 3-in-10 of the Act in the united states, the coronavirus was created in a lab, either accidentally or on purpose. The evidence heavily points to the virus in long-term, naturally.)
Many Americans are also having difficulty discerning accurate information. For example, in the University’s paper, when shown to think of headlines treatments for COVID-19, 40 percent of respondents, on average, judged the actual headlines in this category to be true, and the remaining 60 percent were almost evenly divided between identifying the headline ace on false or acknowledging that they were unsure.”
“If people are unable to discerns, and say that the true information is true, that is a real problem from a public health perspective,” said Sarah kreps, the website of the government, and a law professor at Cornell university and co-author of the paper.
In another preprint, co-authored by Pennycook, respondents were able to distinguish between and accurate, false information about COVID-19, pretty as well as when prompted to. But when asked only whether they would share the information on social media — and not if-they call it-to-be-true or not — were more willing to share the fake news.
“They still only believe in true content, like a 65-ish percent of the time, and the false content they believe like 25 percent of the time, so that’s not great but at least there’s a difference,” Pennycook said. “If you instead ask them which one they would share on social media, they’re terrible at discerning between them. They don’t, basically.”
One of the reasons we might be seeing more people falling for misinformation is the knowledge-gap that comes with an emerging disease like COVID-19. There’s a lot we still don’t know about this virus, and that lack of understanding can create a space that is all too easily filled by conspiracy theories and misinformation.
“An analogy that might be helpful, here is autism, science still doesn’t have a clear explanation of why autism occurs,” said Brendan Nyhan, a government professor at Dartmouth College who studies, and disinformation. “That’s created a demand for explanations of why children develop it, that anti-vaccine activists have already taken advantage of. They’ve provided the very simple story of why children develop autism, taking advantage of the coincidence in time between when autism manifests, and when the children get out first.”
So what do we do while we wait for better scientific answers on COVID-19? Social media web sites, for their part, have been enacted measures to limit and remove the false information about COVID-19. Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo, for example, all the unique cars of the viral video “Plandemic” claimed that a shadowy group of elites, which I was using for the coronavirus to gain power. But an analysis from the nonprofit, activist organization Avaaz found that it can take up to 22 days for Facebook to label ” fact-checked COVID-19 of misinformation on the web site, and that it can spread to millions of users in the meantime. And, MIT researchers have found that misinformation peddlers can to get around Facebook’s efforts to quell the fake news by using an archived version of the URL via the Wayback Machine.
Studies have also found mixed results when it comes to issuing corrections on misinformation. One study on disinformation around Zika, and yellow fever outbreaks in Brazil, published earlier this year in Science, Advances, and co-authored by Nyhan, found that priming people with the factsheet of accurate information had no significant impact on the people’s beliefs, in the subsequent false claims.
One of the Pennycook”s paper ” suggests that merely prompting people to think about the fact that not everything online is true, can be enough to reduce the amount of misinformation they share. But each of the researchers I spoke to expressed concern about people’s ability to discerns accurate information in a pandemic, and what the impact of deluge of bunk might have been on making sure the truth gets communicated.
“The problem is we can’t say how much fake news is reinforcing beliefs and entrenching beliefs and causing people almost have to enter this domain of nihilism, where they just throw up their hands,” kreps, the website said. “They don’t know what to believe, so they’re not going to believe anything. Not believing anything can be made to the pernicious to the believing the fake news.”
