Disinformation is Dangerous – COVID-19, Vaccine/Booster Myths
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Digital media monitoring, including on in-language social media platforms, is a critical component to understanding disinformation narratives that are spreading and enabling trusted experts and media outlets to respond to false claims in a timely and effective manner.
At an Ethnic Media Services briefing, Feb. 10, EMS Myth Buster Project, and the National Conference on Citizenship invited CEO Cameron Hickey, who shared the latest findings of his team of in-language media monitors, to know what to look for particularly about COVID-19, vaccines and boosters, treatments, and related public health issues.
Most of the media on this call have produced stories before, documenting examples of misinformation about COVID and vaccines as part of a project called ‘Myth Busters’ funded by the California Department of Public Health ‘Vaccinate All 58’ campaign.
Siliconeer story on COVID misinformation, which was a call to action for the Gen-Z South Asians, resulted in comments about what they have heard within their community about COVID and vaccines. All comments were collected at on an online wall which Siliconeer created specifically for this project. The video was produced following the call to our readers and can be viewed at this link: https://siliconeer.com/current/believe-me-i-am-right-✓-a-short-film/.
Siliconeer congratulations Cameron Hickey, who was just named CEO of the National Conference in Citizenship (NCoC), a 77 year old non-profit mandated by Congress to support democracy. He is an expert in misinformation and disinformation and has run the Algorithmic Transparency Institute (ATI), a current project of NCoC for the past three years.
Hickey began with praising the efforts of ethnic media and acknowledged his colleague Kaitlyn Dowling, who was accompanying him at the briefing.
“Dowling has really led the work as our senior analyst at ATI over the last year-and-a-half, in particular focused on these issues,” said Hickey.
“Viral misinformation is contagious and dangerous. It is, in some cases, as problematic as some of the actual viruses that are spreading in that it can instigate people to make very poor decisions, that can put their health at risk,” said Hickey.
“We think about missing disinformation in ways that are very similar to the ways that we think about the spread of viruses.
“In fact, when the pandemic first emerged back in 2020, the World Health Organization also noted that we were experiencing an ‘infodemic’ – a massive spread of mis- or disinformation, rumors, lies, and just misunderstandings, spread in ways that are very similar to these viruses, they’re contagious, they go from one person to another, they evolve, and they mutate as they spread across our information ecosystem.
“Recognizing that they bear these same traits is important as we move to think about how we try and understand them, and eventually to tackle them and mitigate their impact.
“It’s important to recognize that the problematic messages that we see and hear online have many different forms. Sometimes, we will call them misinformation, sometimes we will call them disinformation, sometimes we’ll call them rumors, conspiracies, even hate speech is problematic content, and my personal favorite, junk news, stuff that’s not totally false but still not healthy for you, just like junk food.
“All of these are different forms of the kind of stuff that we’re concerned about but it’s important that just to remember that the distinctions between them aren’t as important as the fact that whatever form it’s going to mislead us and we need to address it so we often talk about the difference between misinformation and disinformation as being a difference between things that are false and things that are spread with the intent to deceive people.
“Not everything is false even, if it is problematic. There are a lot of clues to look at when we’re talking about information spreading on social media; rhetoric coming from influencers, even sometimes from public officials; and they fall into a few obvious categories – fear, manipulation.
“We frequently see conspiracy theories. Usually, conspiracy theories reference an important boogeyman with an ulterior motive. When shared without the proper context it can be incredibly misleading. This comes in a wide range of forms.
“When a statistic is shared on the Internet, but we don’t know, for example, what part of the whole that statistic represents, then that might be a much scarier statistic than the reality.
“In terms of public health, pseudoscience things like unproven cures for COVID-19, things that draw together, things that aren’t based on sound research, or medical science, or coming from trusted authoritative sources, spread quite a lot on the internet, and are off.
“As soon as you see things that have the hallmarks of that, it’s another clue to be skeptical.
“Faulty logic – they’re frequently arguments that while they can’t be proven to be false, aren’t necessarily exactly true either. They often come in the form of what we call logical fallacies. A good example of that is a false equivalence argument when you are comparing things and making the implication that ‘if this is true, then that should also be true, because they’re similar.’ But when they aren’t similar, when you’re comparing apples to oranges, then the underlying argument is no longer valid.
“Finally, something that we see often, and this is particularly important in the ever-changing world of Public Health Information.
“Content that is old, might have been true the day it was published, or the day it was originally shared, but when it gets re-shared today, it may no longer be the case.
“We see this across the spectrum. It can often happen when a multi-year-old news article or piece of research is shared, but it can also be the case when it’s an image.
“It does not have to be false to be a problem,” said Hickey.
“Several key health specific themes that are recent and relevant such as – sudden death, these are a wide variety of claims when it comes to high profile deaths.
“Deaths of celebrities to claim that now we’re seeing a rise in ‘sudden death’ and the allegation being that those ‘sudden deaths’ were caused by the COVID-19 vaccine.
“There is no evidence of that. Nonetheless, because high-profile people have died recently, people are attaching themselves to this new sort of theme mis- disinformation.
“Another key theme is the concept of excess deaths. There is a science, data showing that higher than average number of people are dying compared to moments in the past, and the idea that is misinformation here is that this information is being re-contextualized to suggest that those increases in deaths are the result of COVID-19 vaccines.
“There is no evidence to link those two things together, and there is evidence connecting many other reasons for increases in deaths compared to previous moments in time. Nonetheless, the existence of excess deaths is something that folks who are anxious and concerned about COVID-19 vaccines, latch on to and use to amplify their concerns about the vaccine.
“Vaccine detox – these have been popular within Chinese language communities.
“The false idea that harmful vaccine ingredients can be something that you can remove from your body by using herbs and supplements. The idea that you’ve got bad stuff in your body because of the vaccine and here are some illegitimate ways to get rid of it – there’s two different problems here – one that this stuff that’s in your body is problematic and you need to get rid of it, and two, that these sort of false cures in snake oil are going to accomplish that.
“Climate lockdowns – the idea here is that there’s a misunderstanding that that certain actions being taken in certain cities are in effect an effort to limit our ability to move, and that those are the response to concerns around climate change.
“Health risks related to gas stoves – There was recent data about natural gas stoves causing increases in asthma, other health risks, and in the reaction to that, we’re seeing the risk of mis- disinformation about that spreading, often for political reasons.
“Renewed concerns about bird flu, the h5n1 virus, as we are seeing increased cases, and new risks, this is what we would call like an ‘on-our-radar’ threat it is not emerged yet as a significant problem, but given what we know and what we’ve seen in the past, this is one that’s likely to become a bigger issue in the future,” said Hickey.
Diving in with the specifics, Hickey began, “The first one, sudden death – this has been one of the most popular vaccine narratives. It’s spreading in English, in Spanish, in Chinese. There is a junk documentary that emerged recently called ‘Died Suddenly’ that is exploiting families who have lost loved ones suddenly due to other reasons and they’re now turning to blame vaccines as the reason for the loss of their loved ones.
“What we know is that there have been many high-profile deaths and that those high-profile deaths don’t have anything to do with vaccines. But each time we experience one of those, it captures people’s attention. People will be drawn to this misleading narrative.
“There are various claims, like a man dies hours after vaccination – in Chinese a telegram post that claims that high mortality rates are pointing to a depopulation agenda.
“Excess deaths are defined by the CDC as the difference between the observed numbers of deaths that we have in society in a specific time-period and our expectations based on historical data.
“It turns out anti-vaccine activists are claiming that excess deaths are driven by what we just talked about, sudden deaths from vaccines, or other long tail vaccine side effects. There are many concerns that the vaccines were released originally to reduce the population.
“Since the pandemic started, many people postponed important health care. We are now seeing the ripple effects of that.
“In the United Kingdom, new prescriptions for blood pressure medication fell in 2020 and 2021 because people weren’t being screened for high blood pressure. Now that lack of treatment is coming back to hurt us, more people are dying today from conditions that they did not get diagnosed and did not get treatment for.
“Spanish language telegram posts that have stats about mortality that are out of context that come from Australia, that argue that the excess deaths are driven by the COVID vaccine.
“A Tick Tock spread showing a Mexican doctor who claims that 40 Years of research shows that mRNA vaccine should not be used in vaccines because it causes high mortality rates.
“We have a WeChat message in Chinese that quotes an insurance expert that claims and a COVID conspiracy theorist claiming that ‘high excess death rates correlate with high COVID vaccination rates.’
“People are taking this fact, connecting it to the things they believe, or fear, and then amplifying it across social media.
“There are these BBC News posts, an accurate news article from a legitimate news source, but when it gets shared with this additional context, vaccine, or something else, or it’s only a coincidence, suddenly people are questioning the underlying news story, and they are using a legitimate trustworthy news source as essentially the evidence.
“It’s critical to think about what headlines are used, what kind of information one tries to communicate, recognizing that things like this, risk people taking that reporting out of context and using it to fear-monger and amplify,” said Hickey.
“People are claiming that the COVID vaccine contains harmful ingredients. People look at the ingredients, misinterpret the words used for those ingredients, people believe there are things that just aren’t in there at all, and that they communicate. All false ideas, but now this phase that we’re in, is basically assuming that those things are in it, and that you need to get them out of your body.
“The claim is that these harmful ingredients can be removed using detox programs like you would do a juice cleanse or something else, they reference a variety of things, herbs, supplements, other types of cures, for detoxing from heavy metals, for example.
“It’s important to note that this theme links to something that we see often in our disinformation research which is that folks often use sensational, concerning, or exciting things to amplify problematic or misleading messages in service of making money.
“These messages about these detox cures serve the interests of the people who are selling the detox cures.
“Alex Jones and his media empire is incredibly wealthy because they sell vitamin supplements alongside their politically charged mis- or disinformation campaigns that they broadcast,” said Hickey.
“Climate lockdowns – A concept of the 15-minute City in the UK, so creating traffic-based restrictions is the true information. They are attempting to create what’s referred to as a 15-minute city and what that really means is create a community in which all the things that you need are accessible to you within a 15-minute walk or bike ride.
“This concept is being weaponized by folks who are concerned that the green movement is overreaching. They’re concerned that we previously had lockdowns associated with COVID-19 and that those original COVID-19 lockdowns were not to stop the spread of COVID-19 but were instead to control us and to control our lives, and so now that we do not have COVID-19 lockdowns, this new idea of climate lockdowns is emerging as a new fear-mongering tactic. “They’re using this concept of the 15-minute cities and the sort of traffic barriers that we’re seeing to amplify this new idea. They simply put the idea that the pandemic’s over so what’s the next awful thing they’re going to do to us.
“Gas stoves – There was legitimate research that looks at health risks of gas stoves in homes. The research showed that 12 of childhood asthma cases are driven by pollutants that are dispersed by gas stoves. This includes carbon monoxide, in addition the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said that they could move to regulate gas stoves, if they can’t be made safe.
“They did not say that they will ban gas stoves.
“There are no plans to ban gas stoves at the federal level, but some municipalities have moved to limit the installation of new gas stoves in residences, so gas stoves are not banned.
“There is a movement that is very politically charged. It comes frequently from the right. It responds to climate risks and concerns around green overreach and is now fear-mongering about a federal ban on gas stoves or making gas stoves illegal.
“We’ve even seen that in Florida, Governor DeSantis has removed the sales tax on gas stove, so he’s taken a policy intervention in response to the sort of spread of mis- or disinformation. This is a situation in which the original health concerns was made into a politically weaponized tool that then amplifies propaganda.
“H5n1 – There hasn’t been much mis- or disinformation spreading on this yet but there has been some new potential risk amplified by legitimate news coverage in the form of opinion from a trusted source, The New York Times, from a trusted expert Zainabeki, who has the headline – ‘An Even Deadlier Pandemic Could Be Here Soon.’
“There’s good news. We do have a vaccine for h5n1. It is not as easy to produce and there’s not as much of it as there have been for other diseases, including the flu, COVID-19. But it is a considerably harder disease to infect humans. We rarely see human to human transmission.
“It doesn’t mean it’s not something that we should be concerned about, but it is at a lower level of risk today.
“This is a not to say we should not be concerned about it, but we should be cautious about how we report about it, and we should be careful to share facts and pay close attention to it as the situation changes this.
“As we saw with COVID-19, the facts on the ground can shift quickly and it’s important to be responsible and thoughtful and up to date,” said Hickey.
