Fake News and COVID-19: A Bad Situation Made Worse

Viral Disinformation

The spread of disinformation about COVID-19 seems to go hand-and-hand with the spread of the virus itself. While we all try to make sense of an overload of information, and do our part by staying indoors and social distancing, others haven’t taken to those precautions yet. While some people are hoarding canned beans and toilet paper in fear of an upcoming apocalyptic world, our president is informing the nation that, by Easter Sunday, there will be no more sheltering in place. 

This era of disinformation or “fake news” started long before the virus, but is now more threatening than ever. College student are still “spring-breaking” in Florida and there are many more who genuinely do not understand that we must shelter in place. 

Can social media platforms help?

In a March 24 podcast by Marketplace Tech, host Molly Wood discusses confronting fake news with Alex Stamos. Stamos, Facebook’s former chief information security officer, explains how social media moderators are affected by the coronavirus, and what that means for all of us. 

Most moderators are now working from home, which causes a security issue for the social media platforms. Most of what moderators are looking at are private messages, DMs, and posts. 

Stamos explains, “A lot of work goes into protecting the privacy of those users to make sure that that private information does not leave the computer of the content moderator.”

This causes platforms to decide between keeping the risk of bringing content moderators into work, or loosening privacy restrictions to allow these moderators to work from home.  

Instead, these companies are now relying on machine moderation which leads to less accurate results. Some content that is not harmful will be removed, and some content that will be harmful is not removed. 

“The other core issue here is that, in a number of these areas, but especially coronavirus, a lot of the information is coming from public officials.”

He elaborates saying,“When the president of the United States is saying something that is not true, then the entire media and social media environment is going to struggle trying to deal with it.” 

Stamos begs the question, “Should the media still be reporting on Trump’s news conferences?”

He notes that while, yes, it is still newsworthy, it is also untrue. 

According to Stamos, the approach to confronting this wide spread of misinformation in this time is posting links to reliable sources such as the CDC. Organizations and websites have started doing this which will hopefully lead to a more informed general public. It seems that without a government that is handling the coronavirus spread with clarity, we will have to rely on independent sources to moderate misinformation at this time. 

For more information on this topic, listen to the podcast here.