The Role of Social Media in an “Infodemic”
Social media is a tool with tons of potential — from the ability to share photos to communicating with friends. But this past year has shown that it can also be a huge super-spreader of information, and when it comes to a pandemic that affects the almost entirety of the world, there is potential for both hearsay and accurate facts to combine and spread.
The WHO describes this as an “infodemic”, or an overabundance of misinformation that causes confusion about what’s accurate and what isn’t. A commonly known example of this is Donald Trump’s Twitter account, one of the largest drivers of Covid-related misinformation.
Naturally, the president had a huge influence over about half of the country’s views on the pandemic, so tweets like these are extremely dangerous.
In “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” by Langdon Winner, he mentions that although we are used to thinking about tech as a neutral medium at the disposal of users who decide how to use it, “…we usually do not stop to inquire whether a given device might have been designed and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its professed uses.”
Because on social media, more followers equates to more reach, it also equates to more power. Twitter as a platform has contributed greatly to this “infodemic” because it allows users with large followings to have influence over their following. Twitter has made attempts at damage control, by flagging tweets like these as misleading. Other social media platforms, including Instagram and TikTok have taken similar efforts to warn users of harmful information. However, as long as all of these social media platforms work in ways that exacerbate already existing power structures, situations similar to Donald Trump’s twitter run are inevitable.
Sources
Winner, Langdon. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus 109 (1): 121–136. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner
Trump, D. J. [@realDonaldTrump]. (2020, October 28). Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!.[Tweet]. Twitter.
(2020). Novel Coronavirus(2019-nCoV) Situation Report — 13 World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200202-sitrep-13-ncov-v3.pdf?sfvrsn=195f4010_6
