Misinformation could be causing real harm in the community
Like viruses, false information spreads through networks. In March 2020, more than a quarter of the top Covid-19 related videos on YouTube contained misleading claims and those had more than 60m views worldwide. The World Health Organization’s Covid “myth-busters” page counters ideas such as the notion that eating garlic protects you against infection. But how many people believe such claims?
University of Cambridge researchers found in an online survey that about 15% of UK respondents thought it was more reliable than not that “the coronavirus is part of a global effort to enforce mandatory vaccination”, while 9% supported “the new 5G network may be making us more susceptible to the virus”. They found the most important factor linked to resilience to misinformation was numeracy. While we are fully aware that correlation is not causation, it encourages the idea that greater “data literacy” in the population could help bring some critical awareness of the dubious claims circulating on social media. In the meantime, research has shown that an effective strategy is to vigorously “pre-bunk” misinformation – essentially inoculating people against fake news by getting in the warnings first.
