Are Pandemics Xenophobic and Racial?

From Black Death to COVID-19, prejudice is a dangerous side effect of the Pandemics throughout the world. Studies reveal that people tend to turn hostile towards people who they perceive as different. Misinformation plays a key role in this hostility. This article contains a study on misinformation spread in the Indian context.

From left, Jessica Wong, Jenny Chiang and Sheila Vo stand together during a protest on the steps of the Statehouse in Boston, March 12, 2020. Asian Americans across the nation have reported a rise in COVID-19 related racism, fear-mongering and misinformation aimed at Asian communities amid the widening coronavirus pandemic. (Steven Senne/AP)

The internet has become an important source of health information for users worldwide. Along with correct information, the internet allows for instant access to, and dissemination of, misinformation around the globe. With the emergence of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) from its epicenter in Wuhan, China. The misinformation on various social platforms and on the internet erupted like a wildfire, the misinformation, and the positive cases of COVID-19 show a linear relationship. With the increase in a number of positive cases in India, there was a rise in the number of debunked misinformation, especially following the third week of March 2020. The momentum of misinformation had already stated a huge rise before Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Janta Curfew on 22nd March 2020, from then the increase in misinformation has been consistently increasing.

It is important to verify the information on the internet to prevent the panic and misinformation associated with COVID-19. The Internet can serve as a valuable source of information as well as misinformation about the virus globally which can lead to panic situations and creating a so-called infodemic.

At the Munich Security Conference on Feb 15, the WHO Director-General said: “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic”.

Referring to the historical cases of an epidemic like Ebola 2014–15, the World Health Organization (WHO) noted rumors circulating on the internet claiming that certain products or practices could prevent or cure Ebola virus disease.

After COVID-19 was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, WHO launched a new information platform called WHO Information Network for Epidemics(EPIWIN), to share information with groups.

Propaganda and persuasion methods are widely used on the Internet easily reaching target groups, promoting conspiracy theories, and polarizing societies based on religion, politics, and community. The panic-related behavior due to a virus outbreak influences the infodemic spread. This could lead to destructive behavior, such as xenophobia against people from affected countries, community, or religion.

To begin with our study, I would take a moment to share this tweet by the hon. Prime Minister.

Study

Around 726 unique misinformation were scraped from various IFCN certified fact-checkers platforms during the period of Jan 15, 2020, to April 10, 2020. We have used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which is a probabilistic generative model for the collection of discrete data such as text.

To analyze the trend of misinformation categories in India, we selected different time duration in which important events, orders from the government, for e.g. lockdown notification as shown in Table 2 and subsequently visualized the observation from the data.

Table 2: Timelines

10 Jan — 10 Feb Trends

Inferences:

1. The trend in categories of misinformation shows most of the misinformation supported conspiracy followed by casualty and cure.
2. World cloud suggests clearly that the terms used in fake stories were supporting some conspiracy theories.

11 March — 21 March Trends

Inferences:

1. The trend changes to Cure, Prevention, and Remedy- the messages suggesting home remedies, preventive measures from the COVID-19, and vaccine-related misinformation started to spread very rapidly.
2. The word cloud shown in Fig. 4, suggests the treatment of COVID-19 with home-remedies, terms of some herbs commonly used in India.
3. The category of misinformation for the environment, conspiracy, and culture was not so significant.
4. However, the spread of political and casualty stories seems to be equally spread.

17 March — 22 March Trends

Inferences:

1. The misinformation from both category Cure and Business & Economy was at a peak.
2. The word cloud shown in Fig. 6 suggests terms ‘Essential Services’, ‘Lockdown’, ‘Services’, ‘Curfew’, ‘Remedy’ were the most important tags of stories from this period.

22 March — 26 March Trends

Inferences:

1. Misinformation category- Cure, Business, and Casualty- has shown a similar peak.
2. A large share of the casualty-related messages was driven by the increase in casualty in Italy.
3. Misinformation underlying in the Business and Economy category can be seen from the word cloud, where words like ‘Shortage’, ‘Lockdown’, Panic-Buying, etc were the most important terms in the stories from this period.
4. Political, Culture, Conspiracy, and Environment have shown a significant drop in percentage during this period of time.
5. Casualty- terms like ‘Died’, ‘Attack’ can also be seen as the important term used in the misinformation spread during this period of time as shown in the word cloud.

29 March — 10 April Trends

Inferences:

1. Religious or racial misinformation was at the peak during this period followed by the category of Business and Economy, Political and Casualty.
2. Culture-related misinformation has a very significant culture-related growth during this time period in India.
3. It can be observed that there were a lot of conspiracy stories in the earlier stories, as the COVID-19 started to spread in India, but later the religious and cultural misinformation appeared an increasing number from the last 10 days of March.
4. It can also be seen at this time the category of Business and Economics was also at peak followed by the Political category, the Environment, Conspiracy, and The Cure, Prevention and Remedy category has shown a significant drop during this time period.

Conclusion

From the results, it can be concluded that in India, the misinformations has shown varied trend and changes with respect to different time duration. An increase in the number of cases of COVID-19 also has an adverse effect on the spread of misinformation. In the starting when the COVID-19 cases in India were low, it is observed that most of the misinformation was related to a conspiracy theory, but later as cases grew and certain orders came from the government the trend of misinformation changed to cure and remedy for COVID-19. With the start of lockdown, the misinformation category has shown a drastic change to the business and economy category. Later from March 20, there was huge exponential growth in cultural misinformation often leading to violence, social and economic boycotts against individuals.

In this 1625 illustration, Londoners fleeing the plague are barred by country dwellers. NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY/SCIENCE SOURCE

In 1349, the Black Death killed about half of all Londoners; from 1347 to 1351, it killed between 30% and 60% of all Europeans. For those who lived through that awful time, it seemed no one was safe. In France, which also lost about half its population, chronicler Gilles Li Muisis wrote, “neither the rich, the middling sort, nor the pauper was secure; each had to await God’s will.”

There are enough historical pieces of evidence including the current study to suggest that:

Pandemics aren’t xenophobic or racial naturally but they surely fiddle with the societal fault lines!

If you liked the article, navigate to the next:

Education is the way forward for Indian Muslims