The pandemic changed the frontlines of disinformation, too
Written by Raylene Lung and Erika Ibrahim.
With COVID-19 dramatically reshaping life across the globe, it’s also transforming the way information travels. Experts say we need to rethink the way we consume it.
Journalists reporting during COVID-19 face the dual challenge of getting good public information out and stopping disinformation from spreading — or at least challenging it with facts. The problem isn’t a new one, but some experts say this pandemic moment adds new complications to the disinformation crisis.
Panelists Jessica McDonald, Tara Kirk Sell, Felix Simon, Guy Berger and Charles Seife made the case for this Friday in their online panel discussion during the Journalism in the Time of Crisis conference, moderated by Carleton University journalism professor and science writer Sarah Everts, who studies pandemic-related disinformation.
The speakers noted that, in some respects, disinformation being spread during the COVID-19 crisis is not so different from previous crises, such as the Ebola epidemic, and other ongoing ones like climate change.
Kirk Sell, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the defining factor for the pandemic has been the sheer volume of information circulated and attention it’s received so far.
“There’s just so much attention on COVID-19 that it changes the landscape based on what we’ve experienced before, and may provide an opportunity for misinformation to flourish,” she said.
With all this knowledge within the audience’s reach, McDonald — science writer for FactCheck.org — said it comes down to being able to know which sources to trust and what she refers to as “scientific literacy.”
“If people don’t feel that they have a strong scientific foundation, which I would say most of the public doesn’t feel super strong with, it can be kind of scary,” she said. “They don’t know what to expect. And they can find things online that seem technical, and (think) that must be true.”
McDonald pointed out that the public is relying on scientific “preprints” to make sense of the emerging knowledge around the coronavirus on a magnitude that has not been seen before. A preprint is a version of a scientific article that has been made public before being formally peer-reviewed.
Preprints, she said, are a defining factor worthy of study in the ecosystem of disinformation because of the urgency to understand how COVID-19 works and how best to manage the public health crisis.
“They’re really important, because that’s the fastest way to get new information out. And people are learning all the time. That’s sort of what this process has been, trying to get new information about the pandemic out,” said McDonald.
McDonald asserted that preprints are not inherently bad. The problem comes with whether the general public has the scientific literacy to distinguish between research that is carefully carried out, and research that is shoddy.
“It could go either way. It could be a perfectly fine publication that was carefully done by scientists who took their time and thought about it and have good data, or it could be completely made up. Usually, it’s based on something, but it could be people who are not knowledgeable about what they’re doing,” she said.
Felix Simon, a research assistant at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in the U.K., agreed with McDonald, saying that news outlets have a part to play in making transparent the scientific process.
“There’s still basic mistakes in these articles where you make grand claims based on a single study, which sometimes hasn’t even been peer-reviewed, where you don’t make the extra effort to ask more than one or two experts on the topic,” he said.
Simon suggested that the public becomes frustrated when they discover that perhaps not all of the media’s predictions have a credible foundation.
Charles Seife, a professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, said: “One of the things that I’ve noticed is that people tend to be treating the outbreaks like a political affair where you get polls, and you’re trying to make predictions of who’s going to win a horse race.”
He echoed Simon, saying media pundits and experts make the mistake of failing to qualify their predictions. When the science on COVID-19 shifts and contradicts their overstated claims, they undermine their own credibility.
“Once you’ve made a prediction that fails, it’s a very easy weapon to use against you,” he added.
Despite all the challenges noted by his fellow speakers, Guy Berger, director for Freedom of Expression and Media Development at UNESCO, said he’s hopeful that people can navigate the murky information landscape as a result of witnessing science in progress.
“I would hope that people are more savvy about content because they’ve been exposed to stuff that’s not in one universe of certainties,” said Berger, who is based in Paris.
“People begin to realize there are some truths, there are some clear falsehoods, (and) there are some unknowns — and that those unknowns are legitimate sphere for debate.”
To view the whole panel discussion, click here.
