The United Lates of America
Take a look around. Are you happy with how things look at the moment? I‘ll bet you aren’t. At least, not if you live in the United States of America.
One year after COVID-19 became a worldwide problem, the United States is still leading the amount of COVID cases. Let’s take a look at why social media “echo chambers” helped to hold the USA back from a return to normalcy.
Distrust in the media is an unfortunate side effect of the widening divide in American politics. When most people hear the term “fake news,” they likely think of former President Trump popularizing the term in his 2016 run as president. However, this term is not just about biased journalism anymore, it has taken a much more sinister turn.
Deceptive sharing of information has spread beyond the news stations, and is now an epidemic of its own, consuming social media platforms. This type of sharing has lead to misinformation, which in many instances is deliberate, and has set the United States back months in terms of pandemic control.
The Echo Chambers
While social media sites and apps were initially conceived as fun and accessible ways to share experiences with family friends, but have turned into malicious “echo chambers” for lies and conspiracies.
An echo chamber is a space where information and beliefs are shared and reciprocated in communities where they are allowed to fester and grow without opposition.
Sometimes, echo chambers are sought out by people looking for very specific information to support their beliefs and ideals. Let’s say someone was looking for evidence that vaccines caused autism. In this case, the seeker would skip over sites and articles that differ from their point of view, and instead find places that agree with their point of view, and then become a part of that echo chamber for others to find.
However, sometimes people can unintentionally find themselves in echo chambers, and be stuck there indefinitely. There are many cases of internet users going down “rabbit holes” and stumbling upon incorrect information that caused them to change their beliefs based on these fraudulent facts.
So, what does this have to do with the pandemic?
Actually, quite a lot. For instance, let’s take a look at popular news outlets, CNN and Fox News. CNN has a left-leaning bias and Fox News has a right-leaning one. Here are the headlines from these outlets on February 10th, 2020, when the virus was starting to get global attention due to an outbreak on a Princess Cruise Ship.
CNN: “Wuhan Coronavirus Kills 97 More People In One Day as Death Toll Tops SARS”
Fox News: “A New Start in New Hampshire: Democrats Try to Put the Iowa Debacle in the Rearview Mirror”
While this one instance is not indicative of an echo chamber by itself, keep in mind that this is the type of programming on the Fox News Network 24/7. Also remember that while Fox has always been right-wing oriented, it has been driven further in that direction in recent years.
This means that long-time watchers who have been loyal to the network before it was radicalized have already put their trust in the network, and are less likely to change their views.
Picture this: you have an elderly relative who has always held conservative views and trusted Fox as their go-to network for decades. They hold the same beliefs as the anchors, and agree with the guests who are brought on. Then, in the last few years, those very anchors sell them false narratives about election fraud and call the Coronavirus a “hoax.” Especially when the president of the United States goes on the network and talks about how he never wears a mask.
Now, the health of your elderly relative is at risk, because they now buy into the narratives, and will not take COVID seriously as a result.
This is the true danger of so much misinformation in a pandemic: vulnerable audiences become significantly more at risk because of their beliefs. And they naturally put others around them at risk as well as a result.
Ads and Apps
In March of last year, Forbes named Facebook as the number one spreader of false news stories among all social media apps. Part of the reason for this is because Facebook is infamous for allowing many of their ads to get by their screeners, even if the ad contains misinformation.
Take a look at this graph, also from Forbes:
As you can see, fifteen percent of news on Facebook comes from untrustworthy websites. This wouldn’t be as big of a deal if Facebook were not also a source of trustworthy news, or “hard news” as it is labeled on this graph. Since Facebook has roughly the same amount of hard news as the other sites shown here, it may be harder for some to distinguish the trustworthy news sources from the untrustworthy ones.
The Chicago Tribune describes how situations like this can create echo chambers among users. “The key was to seed an initial cluster of believers, who would share or comment on the item, recommending it to others through Twitter or Facebook. False stories spread farther when they were initially aimed at poorly informed people who had a hard time telling if a claim was true or false.”
Even though some sites are able to properly filter out news stories and ads based on falsehoods, there are websites and apps dedicated to helping these types of stories thrive.
The app Parler has been in the news recently, since it was taken off of most app stores due to its abundance of false information.
Marketing itself as the “Free Speech Social Network,” Parler is essentially an echo chamber personified. When the Capitol was stormed by MAGA-influenced domestic terrorists, much of the planning of this raid could be traced back to Parler. Videos posted to the app by rioters inside the Capitol Building are actually helping authorities piece together who was a part of the attack.
An article from Fortune details a day in the life of one of their writers who went undercover on the conservative app. When it came to COVID-19 specifically, the author describes multiple posts calling out “mask propaganda” and how users should band together to protest COVID restrictions.
The issue with Parler and all echo chambers is that their consumers are already invested in the platform, and already hold many of the same views.
Sure, anyone who is not accustomed to the app would look at the call for a “mask protest” and scoff, but a user already indoctrinated to the anti-mask narrative would have no problem reciprocating the call to action.
Here is where fake news has grown beyond just a buzzword, it is now the cause of nationwide mistrust of health officials. Users of these apps have taken it upon themselves to act as experts, and thousands are dead as a result.
Are We Too Far Gone?
It’s easy to look at all of this information and feel like all hope is lost. However, most well-known platforms (besides Facebook) are doing their best to root out untrustworthy sources.
In the graph from earlier, notice that Twitter is much lower than the others when it comes to untrustworthy news. That being said, it’s also low in hard news, however the push for truer sources is still commendable.
Around the time of the 2020 presidential election, Twitter advanced its misinformation detection system. The site marked many tweets with a warning reading “This Claim About Election Fraud is Disputed.”
Many of former president Donald Trump’s tweets were marked as such, to the extent that after a certain number of false tweets, he was removed from the app.
We can only hope that other social media apps will follow suit in the monumental task of vetting their submissions. In the meantime, it is important to remain vigilant when reading news articles, and look for the early warning signs of an echo chamber such as unverified sources or images, and quotes taken out of context.
The future could potentially be bright for the elimination of these echo chambers, but the first step involves social media users becoming more aware of what they are consuming.
So, we’ll see how that goes.
